Hello everyone. I wanted to drop in and share this message from Maggie, our market coordinator, regarding the May Gathering Market:

Hey friends, we want assure you that while we are making the call to cancel next month’s Gathering Market, we will be coming back strong on June 10th with gifts for Father’s Day!

The decision to cancel does not come lightly. Myself, Aria, and David have spent a great deal of time deliberately and looking for alternatives the past week with no luck. Remember that while I have personally been in the market game for a couple of years, this is still a learning curve for myself and the owners of Griffey’s Book Emporium.

Mother’s Day weekend is an important holiday everywhere and especially for small businesses, which is why so many events for it are announced and booked early; something we did not do given the nature of how we book are markets (one month in advance). On that note, moving forward, we will be booking holiday specific markets further in advance to allow time for vendors to set up their market schedules.

Hey August Co. is committed to the vendors and I would not feel right having just a few vendors take the time to set up at a event that I believe will show less foot traffic due to other major events occurring that weekend. Additionally, we want to provide a good experience to our new and regular customers for the event, and we believe having such a limited selection will negatively affect that experience.

I want to thank our vendors who did take the time to become a part of this event and say that you should absolutely be following both of them: Faerie’s Fix and Sam’s Yummy Sweets.

As for everything else, thank you for being a part of this journey and giving us the space to grow and learn. We can’t wait to see you at the next market in June! (Details on the Father’s Day edition of the Gathering Market are coming soon! Check the GATHER JUNE highlight for details)

We really wanted to make the May market work, but in the end we decided that pushing forward would not be the best call for both our vendors and our customers. Most vendors are already booked months in advance for Mothers’ Day weekend, and after much discussion with Maggie, we decided that we simply couldn’t guarantee a wide enough selection of vendors this May to make the market enjoyable for everyone. In light of this, we will be changing how we book vendors for our markets going forward.

Thank you for your understanding. The Gathering Market will return in June for Father’s Day! In the meantime, please consider attending our upcoming Board Game Night this Friday from 5pm to 8pm!