Downtown pop-up market, gift card program aim to benefit local businesses

Listen to this article

Hoping to fill the void left behind by holiday markets that couldn’t open — or had to settle for virtual alternatives — Downtown Partnership of Baltimore will be operating a holiday maker pop-up on Wednesdays throughout the month of December.

“Our local businesses really need our support,” said Shelonda Stokes, president of the partnership. “If we don’t support them now throughout the winter, we can’t expect them to be there in the summer.”

The indoor pop-up was designed to give craftspeople, most of whom don’t have their own brick-and-mortar locations, an opportunity to sell their wares to holiday shoppers despite restrictions on retail operations in Baltimore. The pop-up will be at Center Plaza, just off the intersection of 100 N. Charles Street at Fayette Street, in an unused retail space donated to the Downtown Partnership by Artemis Properties.

Twenty merchants, offering products from candles to cutting boards, will sell their wares at the Center Plaza pop-up. However, in order to allow more shoppers into the space, the makers won’t actually be present at the market. Instead, the market will be operated by the Downtown Partnership, and ways of communicating with the makers themselves — including social media, email, phone numbers, and even in-store presentations and Zoom conferences — will be available to shoppers.

Stokes said she hopes this initiative will steer customers away from the major online retailers that they are likely turning to instead of shopping in-store this holiday season. While the Downtown Partnership has been encouraging Baltimoreans to shop locally since the pandemic’s onset, Stokes said the pop-up will “(add) another nod towards (makers’) visibility with a larger audience.”

Though many feel online shopping is the safest option right now, Stokes said the precautions the Downtown Partnership is taking — such as mandating that all customers wear masks and limiting the number of people in the pop-up at any time — will make shoppers feel comfortable.

The Downtown Partnership opted for an indoor space rather than an outdoor one in order to allow more customers to shop at a time — Baltimore Mayor Jack Bernard C. “Jack” Young’s most recent executive order allows up to 25% capacity in venues with a fire marshal-rated certificate of maximum occupancy, but caps capacity at 10 people for venues that do not.

The pop-up’s model is also unique in that the Downtown Partnership pre-paid for the products being sold in the shop. This benefits the participating retailers because it “increases their cash flow immediately so that they (don’t) necessarily have to wait for the sales to happen,” Stokes explains. The Downtown Partnership plans to buy more products later in the month if the existing inventory sells out.

Following a similar model, the Downtown Partnership is also re-introducing its #CurbsideBaltimore gift card program, which allows people to purchase $35 gift cards to local restaurants and retailers for only $25. The promotion initially launched in March, at which time gift cards of any amount were available, all including $10 more than what the customer paid for them.

From the promotion’s launch until it ended as businesses began to reopen in the summer, people purchased over 11,000 gift cards. Stokes said that during the initial #CurbsideBaltimore program officials learned which gift card values were selling particularly well, leading the partnership to settle on $35 fixed-value cards for the initiative’s second iteration.

Both of the initiatives launch Wednesday, Dec. 2.

“We know that we won’t have all of the answers, but not doing anything, we know, is not the answer,” Stokes said. “Our thing right now is just (figuring) out how to make this a success.”