Holiday markets are expecting to be booming
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- A rainy summer season last year tamped down marketing efforts
- Malls continue to provide an experience to shoppers
Mike Bryce makes the rounds at the Providence Artisans Market in Lippitt Park, next to the Hope Street Farmers Market, checking in with his fellow artists.
For many, like him, art is their full-time job, while for others, it’s something they do on the side.
Bryce, a prolific painter of seascapes, Del’s Lemonade cups, flowers and landscapes, started the artisans market 12 years ago before he started polling his artists on what they thought about a holiday market. The response was tremendous, and the market has grown each year. Last November, 2,300 people clicked through the doors at the Waterfire Arts Center.
“I use the 26 weeks of outdoor markets to let everyone know,” Bryce said.
Bryce and many artists across the state are part of the broader retail community that is preparing for the coming holiday shopping season, including Rhode Island’s three major malls.
Bryce’s markets at the Waterfire Arts Center run Nov. 16 and 17 and Dec. 14 and 15.
Malls focus on bringing experiences to shoppers
At Garden City Center, general manager Joe Koechel said there is one given: People always talk to him about that one time at the mall.
Sometimes, it’s about food, at restaurants that have come and gone. At other times, it’s about shops that were once there.
“People tell me stories. They’ll say, ‘I remember when my grandpa used to take me here for Christmas,'” Koechel said. “It lives on more than any other center I’ve ever been involved in. This is part of the history of people’s families. They remember when this or that happened at Garden City Center.”
Most of the time, it’s about a place and a time, usually around the holidays, like a visit with Santa. Koechel works to keep building new memories for each successive generation, while also listening to what the current patrons want, like adding more seating and chess boards on some tables.
At the Warwick Mall, much like Garden City Center, the idea during the holiday season is to elevate shopping into an experience and make the mall a so-called “third place” – somewhere people can find comfort and community beyond their home and the workplace.
While Santa will be making appearances at both locations, for Warwick, it also means a holiday vendor market that was held on Nov. 10.
The wide boulevards inside the Warwick Mall, detached from the weather outside, lend themselves perfectly to vendors, from a “holiday shopping extravaganza” held earlier in November to a small-business marketplace on Dec. 1.
For experiences, Santa might be iconic, but so too are the puppet performances of Wayne Martin at the Warwick Mall, general manager Domenic Schiavone said.
“We still have a piano player, a balloon artist for the kids and people come and line up for the puppet show that’s been going on for almost 30 years,” Schiavone said. “Parents are bringing their kids, and those parents came when they were kids.”
Providence Place and its owner, Brookfield Properties, did not respond to multiple requests for interviews for this story. The mall was placed in receivership at the beginning of November, though operations are not expected to change in the short term.
For more on Providence Place, read reporter Paul Edward Parker‘s odyssey into the inner workings of the mall.
Warwick Mall keeps bustling
For Schiavone, reports of the death of retail appear to be greatly exaggerated. While online shopping certainly has changed much of the retail industry and the way people shop, that does not always preclude a visit to the store.
On a Thursday in October, the mall was bustling, the way it normally is, Schiavone said.
For many retailers, including department stores and big retailers like Target, online shopping doesn’t stop people from visiting brick-and-mortar stores and malls. By offering free pickup, they still draw customers into their stores and the surrounding environs, Schiavone said. Even without the new ways of getting people in the door, he said, customers still enjoy coming to the mall.
The touch, the feel of products
Many customers still want to touch, feel and try on things they’re going to purchase, and no matter how easy returns have become, nothing beats getting it right the first time, Schiavone said.
At Mod Mama in Garden City Center, that’s particularly important, as new parents try out car seats and strollers to find what’s right for them and what fits their style, owner Julie Navarro said.
The baby and children’s boutique store is all about experiences, with special events and a space for children to play. Navarro said the holiday season does not represent any difference in total sales, partly because people continue to have babies all year. What is selling does change, as people seek gifts for those with children, Navarro said.
Navarro has a 35-pound weighted doll that can be put into strollers to give prospective buyers a better sense of what it feels like to push one with a baby on board.
“It’s one thing to look at a picture of a stroller, but it’s a completely different thing to actually be behind it and pushing it over the bricks outside and taking it down the stairs,” she said.
Sales are getting back to the peak they reached in 2019, but aren’t quite there yet, she said.
“People are coming in for a lifestyle change, fundamentally, not for anything else,” Navarro said. “And that doesn’t come on a schedule.”
Making your own jewelry
Down the road at Garden City Center, Rachel and Omar Ajaj have expanded their jewelry-making business, Air & Anchor, to allow shoppers to customize in-store, creating both jewelry and an experience to go with it.
The pair have been moved around Garden City Center a few times, operating “pop-ups” with buildouts, before moving into their current location. The “experiential retail” is booming, as is the rest of the couple’s jewelry business.
While the online store is big and allows customization, it is a vastly different experience.
“It’s very different when you’re in here, ” Omar Ajaj said.
Like many other artists, they find that the season doesn’t break up easily into the holidays and the rest of the year, with summer being “tremendously great,” competing with the holiday season. The holidays are big, but sometimes, January and February are big months, too.
“It’s like after the holiday, I think everybody gets their gifts and then they’re like, I want more,” Rachel Ajaj said.
While the couple have been increasing the physical presence of their business, even selling at the Newport Folk Festival, online still makes up the majority of their sales.
A few kinds of markets
Artists interviewed for this story identified a few different classes of markets. There are artisan markets, like the one at Providence’s Lippitt Park, that happen weekly, usually for part of the year, much like the Providence Flea or the Warren Walkabout.
Then there are the big, festival-like markets that bring in big crowds, like the Scituate and Wickford art festivals; the multiple holiday markets; the Foundry artist show in Pawtucket; and RISD Craft, which happens once in the spring and once in the fall.
For jewelry maker Sema Gurerk, who sells under the name Floweredsky Designs, the big markets, including the holiday ones, represent a big chunk of her income over the year. If there were four more a year, she wouldn’t have to do regular weekend shows, because they bring in so many sales, an estimated 60% of her business.
“I think those markets, people attend with the intention of getting a lot of gifts purchased from different vendors,” Gurerk said.
At the artisans market in Lippitt Park, Zach Prosser sat next to a pop-up tent filled with his paintings, many of them created for Halloween.
The self-taught artist said he has been painting for 10 years but only started selling five years ago.
“My paintings were building up in the basement, so I felt like I had to do something,” Prosser said.
While Prosser does the weekend art markets in Lippitt Park and a few big ones, like the Scituate Art Festival, he’s sitting out the holiday markets this year after sales last year were like an average Saturday in Lippitt Park.
“I sell my small pieces here and there, but for me, it just doesn’t end up being worth what it costs to do the show and the work that gets put into doing the show,” Prosser said.
Prosser is going to spend this winter working on his social media presence, including making videos on TikTok, like watching him paint, giveaways, and his massive cat.
The holiday market shuffle
Jeweler, designer and stone carver Marge Hinge works markets eight months a year. For her, the holiday markets consistently bring in more sales – 20% more than others.
For Hinge, selling online is worth it. Her pieces, often carved from stone, sell for $55 to $1,000, with an average price of $250. That makes all the work that goes into preparing an online listing worth it, even when each piece is one-of-a-kind.
Hinge said her business roughly breaks down into thirds: a third is selling in person, a third is online and a third is wholesale or consignment.
One last blockbuster sale
Many of the big holiday markets rely on marketing done through the normal April-October season to get out the word about the final shopping days of the year. Last year, market sales were down because it rained nearly every weekend, reducing opportunities to market for the holidays.
Traffic to Bryce’s holiday markets and the Foundry market in Pawtucket was down.
“How will we do this year? I have no idea,” Bryce said. “I’m hoping for the best, being positive, always positive.”
Is online shopping a threat to artists?
Ask any artist at a market about their online sales, and the answers vary wildly, from over 90% of their income to 10%. Some have found that the effort that goes into putting work online, then packaging and shipping it, is more trouble than it’s worth.
For many, that’s a structural barrier. Prosser is trying to sell more art online through his website. But a big painting costs upwards of $150 to ship across the country, not to mention all the packing that goes into it, a lot of work for someone who does painting part-time.
For others, like fabric artist Kirsten Cole, it’s about all the little work that goes into online listings. Every piece needs a photo, a description, a title, key words, all of the things that make it appear in a search engine and as an entry in a website. All of that takes a tremendous amount of time that could instead be spent making new pieces, she said.
Since every piece of Cole’s is relatively unique, that means every piece needs a new listing, and Cole makes a lot of pieces.
For Taryn Hume, who makes polymer clay earrings, her artistry started during the pandemic, exclusively through online sales. Her first in-person market was Gaspee Days, which was a smashing success. Since she started doing markets, that mix has shifted to about 70% in-person sales. Still, the market season is April through December.
“I’ve started to promote more for online sales in the ‘off-season,’ but a lot of the groups now are offering more holiday markets, so I actually signed up for more holiday markets this year than I’ve ever done in the past. I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes,” Hume said.
Markets are about marketing
At the artisans market in Lippitt Park, Gurerk motioned to the person set up next to her, oil painter Karen Murphy. The pair share many of the same buyers and cater to overlapping demographics, They always try to get booths next to each other at markets.
While the two have much in common, their price ranges and sales volumes are very different. Both, however, find a great deal of value in the weekend markets and the big-event markets, including the holiday ones.
In addition to being a venue for sales, Murphy said, the events also provide a marketing opportunity: getting people familiar with their work, signing them up for a newsletter, and getting them interested in the next market.
Bryce said he printed out flyers for the two holiday markets and gave them to all the artists to hand out, to drive even more traffic to the later ones.
Gurerk keeps postcards for her upcoming shows at her booth, as well as business cards.
“If they can’t do it now, they usually do it on the next one, because the more they see me, the more they trust me and my work and they come back,” Gurerk said.
Follow Wheeler Cowperthwaite on X, @WheelerReporter, or reach him by email at wcowperthwaite@providencejournal.com.