FLOWER AVENUE HOLIDAY MARKET SPRINGS TO LIFE ON SATURDAYS

Here's a "guest blog" from Chris Lancette, the entrepreneur that is doing the Flower Avenue Holiday Market

FLOWER AVENUE HOLIDAY MARKET SPRINGS TO LIFE ON SATURDAYS

I’m excited to report that our up-and-coming home-based business (Orion’s Attic) has launched the Flower Avenue Holiday Market on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. through December 24. Located at the corner of Flower Avenue and Arliss Street, the market is designed to achieve several short-term and longer-term goals that center around the idea of linking community with commerce.

For the holidays, we want to create a new destination in our own neighborhood for people to shop locally and for entrepreneurs to generate income. Along with a number of our vendors, I live within minutes of the Holiday Market. I hope everyone in Montgomery County and beyond comes out to peruse antiques, art, books, collectibles, furniture, hand-made clothing and accessories, holiday baskets, jewelry, and all kinds of other treasures.

This is just the beginning.

There is tremendous entrepreneurial and artistic talent in the Long Branch community. We want to celebrate it, show it off, and nurture it – while giving residents a great shopping experience. We are already exploring options to keep this momentum going at this same site in 2012 thanks to the support of Flower Avenue Shopping Center owner Greg Fernebok, whose enthusiasm and generosity is making this operation possible. He is allowing us to donate the rent we’re paying for the space to IMPACT Silver Spring. We are partnering with IMPACT – a nonprofit organization dedicated to economic empowerment -- to give a few new entrepreneurs a chance to sell their products at a market for the first time. One sells cosmetics by Mary Kay, another makes beautiful curtains.

We are also creating space for local service providers to promote themselves … like the “Tutor Table” of foreign language translators and tutors who will soon make their debut. A great local restaurant, La Escudilla, will fill the air with the tantalizing scent of its cuisine. We are also in the process of creating a coupon booklet to encourage market shoppers to explore nearby businesses.

Orion’s Attic is itself a local business run by Won-ok Kim and me. The mission of our home-based antique and high-end flea enterprise is to enable people to “buy good stuff, do great things.” We partner with and serve great Montgomery County nonprofits in everything we do, from donating a percentage of our profits to conducting fundraisers for them. We are open by appointment, sell online through our Web site and other venues, provide estate sale services, and throw huge “Upscale Yard Sales” like the ones we do at our home and the fundraiser we did for Pyramid Atlantic in downtown Silver Spring last October.

Our effort to create a Saturday market in Long Branch is the next stage of our evolution and it is already making an impact. Vendors are generating sales. We’re putting local teenagers to work and we are spending money at Silver Spring businesses that are printing our signs and providing our supplies. We even bought an old truck that was parked about 100 feet from the market site. The seller himself is an industrious young entrepreneur who is seeking to buy a bigger truck he can use to make deliveries for companies needing his help.

We hope everyone can make plans to visit the Flower Avenue Holiday Market each Saturday. There will be additional vendors (including a rare books dealer on Dec. 10) and other attractions each week. We’re also grateful for anything you can do to help us spread the word through social media and word of mouth. We’ve got a few thousand flyers to distribute, too.

Visit www.orionsattic.com for more information about the market and to learn more about what we’re doing to bring commerce and community together in Silver Spring. You can also contact me directly if you would like to get involved.

Let’s celebrate Long Branch together. Hope to see you Saturday!

Christopher Lancette
Co-proprietor, Orion's Attic
“Buy good stuff, do great things."
chris@orionsattic.com
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