Event Recap: AKASSA x Artillery Makers Market
Last month, we joined forces with Artillery Art Gallery and OCA San Francisco to bring our first in-person Makers Market to life. For our inaugural event, we wanted to highlight three core elements aligned with AKASSA’s mission:
Celebrate Women’s History Month by showcasing women-owned small businesses around the Bay Area
Create a space that empowers our vendors to feature their work while connecting with the community
Give back to the local community by raising money for a charity in San Francisco
We are thrilled with the results of this event! Not only did the weather clear up for us, but the number of people who showed up to attend and support exceeded our expectations. As always, we love sharing our learnings. Read on below for a few highlights and see what we learned about building a Makers Market.
Highlights
Setting up our vendors for success
As we continue building our Makers Markets, we’re interested in evaluating the business impact our events have on the participating artists. We asked our vendors to share their final revenue from the day so we could get an idea of how our markets are helping local businesses. This event drove over $5,000 in sales across all our vendors, and we’ll use this number as a baseline to understand if future markets are successful.
During this event we had 10 female-owned local small businesses participate. This lineup included:
Plus two additional guest vendors:
Jenn Ban from Sacred Skin Adornments
Lyss Gruezo from Mayari Sol Creations
We curated the market so that we could bring in a variety of vendors across different mediums. We also had to get creative with the vendor layout since the Artillery Art Gallery is an unconventional event space. To ensure that each artist was set up for success, we collected information on their typical vending set-up and placed each artist in places around the studio where we thought they would do best.
Keeping philanthropy at the heart of our work
Every AKASSA event includes our passion for philanthropy. Over the last few years, we’ve put on several different events, and always choose a local charity that we believe in to support. In the past, we’ve looked for AAPI or women-focused charities in alignment with our mission.
Last year, after connecting deeply with SAHARA’s work in supporting the South Asian community in Southern California, we realized that we want to support charities that are more open and transparent. We look for organizations that share exactly what their programs do, and how donations are utilized. We also try to understand whether or not they would benefit from the awareness our events bring on top of their existing efforts.
For our March Makers Market, all proceeds supported the San Francisco Asian Women’s Shelter because of all the different programs they provide for survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking, especially those who are immigrant or refugee women, children, LGTBQ+/GNB, and/or youth.
We highlighted SFAWS and its programs in our application process, as we believe our commitment to philanthropy in each event sets AKASSA apart from other markets. We were happy to see that many vendor applications specifically referenced the charity and healing that’s promoted by SFAWS as a factor that made them apply for the AKASSA x Artillery Makers Market.
We used this event as a trial to better learn how to increase our overall donations.
Vendor pledges: To participate in this event, our vendors were asked to pledge a percentage of their sales to the charity. We intentionally created a sliding scale starting at a minimum of 5% so that vendors of all sizes could join us. We didn’t want participation to be cost-prohibited for vendors who might just be getting started, and the sliding scale meant that each vendor could make a pledge that made sense for them.
Entry donations and raffle tickets: Though the event was free, we encouraged guests to donate at the door (or online via Eventbrite). In exchange, we provided raffle tickets so that people could participate in a multi-draw raffle throughout the day in Artillery’s garden. Additional raffle tickets could be purchased for a $5 donation if people wanted more chances to win.
AKASSA merchandise purchases: We sold AKASSA merch from previous events, as well as introduced new items for this Makers Market. We pledged to donate 15% of all our sales to charity.
All in all, we were able to raise over $1,000 for the SF Asian Women’s Shelter!
Connecting with the community
Aside from being a shopping experience and fundraising event, we also worked with Artillery to provide two hands-on clay activities, led by studio managers Lyss and Alyssa. Attendees got a chance to participate in a Women’s Body Sculpt workshop or help paint and carve a community vessel that Artillery made specifically for this event.
We also structured the event in a way that invited attendees to stay and connect with fellow members of the local community, and we could see people staying to chat all throughout the studio as well as in the garden.
Lessons along the way
We recognize that this was a GREAT turnout for our first Makers Market. We couldn’t have done it without our organization partners, Artillery Art Gallery and OCA San Francisco, as well as our volunteer staff that helped us on-site during the day.
As a small organization, we also want to be transparent about our learnings and areas where we feel we can grow. Here are some of our main takeaways:
Gotta make that money. We’re continuing to explore new ways to increase our revenue. We didn’t break even on our expenses such as marketing and merch printing. Some of our other expenses included things like acrylic sign holders and donation bins, which ultimately are an upfront investment for a small business like ours. We won’t have to purchase these things again, which will lower our expenses for future events. Our ultimate goal is to become sustainable enough to continue delivering events that promote AAPI/women-makers.
People LOVE raffles. We were originally unsure on hosting a raffle, but saw it as an opportunity to have something fun and engaging throughout the day. We hoped that it would encourage people to stick around and browse longer, and were glad to see that this worked! Not only did people extend their time shopping and come back later in the day, but it gave all the vendors more time to connect with attendees.
In-person vs. virtual? Last year we hosted our first virtual market and found that we were able to reach more buyers in different locations. Because our team is split between San Francisco and Los Angeles, hosting an event virtually allowed us to reach our entire network and more. However, the energy of in-person events can’t be replicated online. Since we’re such a small team of 4 (and we all have full-time jobs outside of AKASSA), we’ve decided to focus on learning from in-person markets and will revisit our virtual marketplaces at a later time.
We learned a lot and were able to connect with our greater community in the Bay Area. We now have a foundation to build upon for our next Makers Market event in SoCal.
The four of us are truly so blessed to have the support that we’ve had leading up to this event, and we’re so excited to see where AKASSA will go. If you’re here, reading this post, regardless of whether or not you were able to attend our last event, we just want to say thank you! Your continued support in helping us make our events successful keeps our creative endeavors going.
If you are based in Southern California and are interested in our upcoming event, come see us at Blossom Market Hall in San Gabriel Valley on May 27th. Follow us on Instagram for updates and we hope to see you soon!
-
If you’re interested in partnering with us or becoming a vendor, drop us an email at hello@akassa.co. We’re always on the lookout for new opportunities to continue building events that amplify the AAPI community or those who identify as women.