Chris Thomas

Once again, my apologies for the delay in posting the Market Reports.  My home has had ongoing reconstruction activities for the last several weeks due to a water leak, and it’s simply amazing how much time gets destroyed during that process.  I can’t imagine how people who lost homes during the tornado’s must feel — devastating, I’m sure.

• River Market 5/5: $158 avg sales/vendor
• Sunday Market 5/6: $441

There was a lot going on this weekend, including Cinco de Mayo events around town; I know that our HITs 96 Running of the Chihuahuas event was well-attended and fun. 

The next several weekends are typically extremely popular: Mother’s Day, Strawberry Festival & The Beast Feast!  And with Memorial Day begins our traditional tourist season, so the River Market traffic typically jumps accordingly.

Finally, we’ve set the opening date for the Ringgold Market to be Saturday June 2.  Several farms and vendors have already expressed interest in attending, so I’m feeling fairly good about things.  Ringgold is certainly excited, and it’s nice to be working with such a supportive community.  

See you this weekend!

It’s Tuesday already?

After approximately 27 event-hours taking place over the weekend, we’re all a bit sluggish in our weekly processing of the reports and prep for the upcoming weekend.  So I’m going to keep things brief:

• 4/28 River Market & Night Market: $374 avg
• 4/29 Market: $496 avg

The pace of our markets were very enjoyable this weekend, and Sunday felt very normal and comfortable.  If you are a new vendor, Sunday is the balance we typically hope to achieve most weeks — crowded enough to be fun and profitable, but relaxed enough that people can stroll and shop.  We don’t want to have crushing crowds all of the time; those are fun, and great buzz, but would ultimately drive our core customers away.

On a related note, our 2012 Vendor Sales have already reached $227,059 as of this weekend!  Considering our first year of management posted total annual sales of just $1 million (which in itself was a record-breaking season), I’m pretty darn happy with the state of the union.

I’ve had a number of vendors indicate that they are looking forward to joining us at the Ringgold Market, which is really terrific news.  I’m still looking for one or two more full-selection produce farms to round out the product mix, but we’re ahead of schedule on our rollout.

See you on Sunday!

Last night, the Ringgold City County approved the formation and operation of The Ringgold Market — a cooperative effort between the City of Ringgold and The Chattanooga Market.  This new expansion market is intended to help with the post-tornado  efforts and help promote economic and community renewal in downtown Ringgold.

This new event is designed to be a farm & food-oriented “tailgate” market, and will be held on Saturday mornings from 8-11 in front of the historic Catoosa Court House.  The City will be providing support services (sanitation, traffic assistance, etc) and area downtown businesses & the Downtown Development Advisory Board will assist with marketing & promotional efforts.  My expectations are that this will begin as a small market, but with strong local support and solid growth potential.

Our next steps are to work with the Georgia Department of Agriculture and local health officials to make certain we understand the rules and regulations of operating a marketplace south of the border, but our hopes are to begin operations in late May.

If you are a farm or local food manufacturer that might be interested in attending this new venue, please let me know;  I’m hoping to have about a dozen vendors this first season, and would like to begin the process of planning & scheduling for the imminent grand opening!

I’ve been somewhat negligent in my tradition of sharing market reports each week, due to a variety of work and home related disruptions.  A lot of good things going, but just not enough time in the day to get everything done as hoped.  And for some reason, I think this entire season is going to be that way!

Opening Day went nearly as expected, although I believe we were all very pleasantly surprised by the sheer size of the crowds.  It not only was the largest opening day ever, but also the largest market day in our history — that was as good as it’s ever been!  Pretty amazing, and hopefully a sign of good things ahead.

2012, so far:

• 3/24 River Market, $7,800 total sales, $269 sales/vendor avg
• 3/31 River Market, $11,500, $311 avg
• 4/14 River Market, $6,150, $256 avg
• 4/21 River Market, $4,056, $290 avg

The River Market is primarily a tourist-centric market, and thus tends to have strongest sales during the tourist season — Memorial Day through Labor Day.  It’s certainly not bad at the moment, and the weather is milder… just different.

Our Sunday Market is traditionally more oriented towards the locals, although we’ve reached the size where it has become a regional tourist attraction as well.  Our product sales typically favor foods & farms during this portion of the year, but arts/crafts still can do quite well — some days better than others.

 Our average sales for this last weekend were exceptional across the board:

• 4/22 Opening Day, $104,100 total vendor sales!, $609 average sales/vendor!

Simply incredible.  For those that enjoy whacky stats, that amount works out to $5.78 per second! Local really is better!

The product categories which did well were very evenly distributed - everything from art, furniture, concessions, farms, flowers, photography, clothing, jewelry and body care products all posted above-average sales.  Overall, there were no product-specific sales spikes common with some events (like Strawberry Day or Oktoberfest); it was a well-rounded event.

The downside of having crowds that large is that it isn’t necessarily great for casual shopping; to this point, some of our vendors outside did much better than similar vendors inside…  outside was more relaxed!   I expect that we won’t see this size of crowd again for a while, so our more relaxed nature will return - and sales should improve for those products/vendors which benefit from closer vendor/customer interactions.  The crowds are exciting a buzzworthy, but not always the most profitable.

Regardless, it’s nice to start the season with a record breaker!  I look forward to seeing you again this weekend, have a great week!

Hi River Market Vendors!

We are going to be partnering with the Tennessee Aquarium and HATCH this upcoming weekend, and have been asked to encourage everyone to try to do some form of interactive arts & crafts this upcoming weekend.  For example, if you paint - perhaps you could demonstrate your art during the river market hours.

Thanks!

I hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday break;  we’re back at work, wrapping up the final details of the 2012 season and preparing for the mad rush of preparing the printed materials, advertising campaigns and other logistics necessary to make our markets seem effortless to our customers.

I always like to look back on the past to see how we’re doing, and wanted to share a recap of the 2011 season with you.

In 2011:

• we organized sixty-eight distinct events, and held sixty seven (Arts in the Park was flooded out!)
• during those events, our vendors reported record sales of $2,085,849
• average vendor sales, across all markets/events, was $354 per vendor per day
• the worst market day was $78/vendor (a rainy River Market day); the strongest was $935 (Head of the Hooch)

The Top 5 Events, as measured by total vendor sales:

• Oktoberfest
• Mother’s Day
• Strawberry Festival
• Peach Festival
• Opening Day

Vendor sales by major category:

• farms & local food: $797,840
• artisans: $848,996
• concessions: $401,822

Due largely to the River Market and extended Holiday Market season, our artisans took the lead for the first time ever in total sales!   Local food sales continue to improve, and all indicators suggest that the upward trends should continue well into 2012.

With the final weekend of the season behind us, it’s time to relax and enjoy the calmer weekends…  it’s been a fun year, and 2012 looks to be even better.

Our Holiday Markets were solid this season, with combined three-weekend sales of over $254 thousand dollars!

• Holiday Market: $120,920
• Holiday Market Too!: $133,853

We’re still waiting on one or two missing sales reports from this last weekend, but Friday sales were about $25k and Saturday’s results doubled to over $51k.  There are a few tweaks we’ll be making in 2012, but I think the general consensus is that the indoor extension is clearly worth the effort.

I’ll have a more detailed report later, probably late January or so, but our 2011 Chattanooga Market Season reported vendor sales of (at least) $2,083,493! That’s up 10% over last season, and in particular we’ve seen stronger arts & crafts sales than we have in recent history.

We’ve worked hard, now it’s time to rest.  Enjoy the holidays, and I look forward to seeing everyone again in the early spring.  River Market opens on March 24, and the Sunday Market will open on April 22!

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

After the final weekend of the Holiday Market Too!, we plan on taking some time off.  Our offices will be closed from Wednesday, December 21 until Monday, January 9.

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

I know that many of our vendors are using Facebook, twitter, Google+, etc. to communicate and promote their businesses/activities with the world.  I first joined twitter during SxSW several years ago (when it first launched), and it’s taken me several years to figure out what it’s really good for.

Actually, I’m still working on that.

But I’m making headway. One new application which I’ve fallen in love with is Flipboard for the iPad (and, more recently, the iPhone). If you are not already familiar with it, Flipboard allows for you to build a custom daily newspaper/magazine filled with sources, topics and information which interests you — and while it gathers those articles using a variety of electronic feeds, twitter is the primary tool for aggregating curated topics.

To feed my info habit, I’ve started building “columns” of information based on the things I like to read about: tech, business, public markets and local chattanooga news & events. The interesting aspect of this process is that I can share my lists with you, and the rest of the world, which promotes my lists to the role of a micro-publisher of sorts.

As such, I’m also building a few Chattanooga Market lists to “publish” the feeds from our vendors, sponsors, and other markets from around the world.  If you want to take a peek, or even subscribe, visit twitter.com/chattamarket/lists for more details.

Here’s where I need your help:  if you are a market vendor and use twitter, tweet “I’m a @chattamarket vendor!” and I’ll add you to our vendors list.  Tracking the “mentions” is the simplest way to to get you added, plus I’m never above a bit of self-promotion!