 The Art Garage, located at 23rd and Kearney, will be hosting gas! green.art.sale, a monthly community market, providing a place and opportunity for creative and diverse individuals to share, sell and trade. The 2013 season will kick off on Friday, May 31st, from 5:30 to 8:30pm. The market will be free to vendors and spaces will be filled on a first come, first served basis. In lieu of a booth fee, we ask vendors to donate 10-15% of their sales to the Art Garage, a non profit 501(c)(3) community art center. The market will be held the last Friday of the month, May through October. If you are interested in selling your home-grown produce, home-made foods, and/or original underground arts and crafts, contact the Art Garage at 303-377-2353, or send an email inquiry to green.art.sale@gmail.com. More information can be found here.
 This is Part 3 of our ongoing segment featuring vendors who have participated with the HAHO Market in order to start and grow their entrepreneurial dreams!
Kassia's Pasta Farm
Without a market like the Handmade Homemade Market, Kassia’s Pasta Farm would not be moving as quickly towards the dreams of preparing pasta full time and making a local, organic product more easily accessible to a wider range of people. The HAHO Market facilitated her business from the beginning by keeping the vendor fees low and for providing a comfortable community event in which to work in. This gives Kassia the ability to experiment with new concepts, connect with other vendors and attendees to exchange ideas and to barter for new ingredients.
Over the course of 2012, Kassia's Pasta Farm's business branding, tabling materials, and product have greatly developed and improved.
“Having the opportunity to try new things in a low stress, supportive environment has been priceless. Without the chance to test the market, meet likeminded people, and get the encouragement I needed, I would not be applying to other markets this year or building a food cart to sell ready to eat pasta at events. It's been a wonderful experience both to look back on my growth and the growth of other HAHO businesses. Thank you guys so much for your support and encouragement! I look forward to many more markets and shenanigans!”
 This is Part 2 of our ongoing segment featuring vendors who have participated with the HAHO Market in order to start and grow their entrepreneurial dreams!
The POMM, a Denver local bean-to-bar chocolate company, owes many thanks to the Handmade Homemade Market for providing an excellent environment to give new and up and coming businesses a shot at success. The HAHO Holiday Market of 2011 was the POMM’s first ever event debuting their chocolate products, and turned out to be far more successful than ever imagined. The POMM’s owners, Damaris Graves and Katelyn Fox, were so encouraged by how well their products were received at the holiday market that they decided to turn a hobby into a full-fledged business endeavor.
The POMM has come a long way from their first market last December, and is now carrying their products at a number of local organizations, including one of the Denver Art Museum’s gift shops. To all the entrepreneurs of handmade homemade goods in Denver, the HAHO market is a great place to introduce new products and for networking with other local business owners. The POMM will definitely be attending the 2012 HAHO holiday market, and both Damaris and Katelyn look forward to seeing the new and familiar faces of local artisans!
Come see The POMM and other blossoming businesses all year long at the Denver Handmade Homemade Market! The next market is coming up on April 13th from 3-8PM at the Denver Art Society!
September 7, 6-8 PM at Waste Farmers/Timberline Nursery, 5685 Tabor St. Check it out!
Hey All! Have you heard of the The GrowHaus? They're a non-profit indoor farm, marketplace and educational center right here in Denver, and they are working hard to generate alternatives to the existing industrialized food system and to foster connectedness in the community. Right now they need a little help to keep up the good work, so please take a peek at their collaboration with the Beanstalk Foundation, see the possibilities, and invest in creating change!
Hardpan Horticulture, one of our long-time vendors with some of the best produce and canned goods around, is offering a .05 cent rebate for undamaged, relatively clean glass canning jars brought back to them at the market. Additionally, they'll be offering this rebate before the market as well, so if you're interested send us an email with your contact information and we'll pass it on to them!
What is the Gypsy Farm Bus you may wonder? In short, it is a start-up social enterprise designed to help urban and small family farmers aggregate and sell produce (and hand crafted goods) in the community via a school bus that has been converted into a mobile farmers market. Here’s the exciting news: we will introduce the bus to the community at the upcoming Denver County Fair. Since we are just starting up, we have not fully fleshed out our business structure or lined up producer members for our cooperative. And this is where we need your help… First and foremost, in order to fully showcase the Gypsy Farm Bus at the Denver County Fair, we need to stock the bus with fresh produce and handmade goods. We will not be able to sell items until we’ve jumped through all the business development and licensing hoops and hurdles. So for this event, will you help us stock the bus by donating a bushel of fresh produce? After the Denver County Fair we will donate all the fruits and vegetables we received to Produce for Pantries, a fabulous program which stocks our community’s food banks with fresh, healthy food. As compensation we can offer passes to the Denver County Fair for the first 25 farmers who donate a bushel of produce for the event (thank you, DCF for the passes)! If you would like to donate produce, please contact gypsyfarmbus@gmail.com. Secondly, we need your help to develop the cooperative business structure for the bus. To ensure that we create an innovative, democratic business structure that helps all boats rise, we need lots of input, ideas and general creativity (things we know are found in abundance within this circle). As a first step, please use this link to answer 10 quick questions that will help us move forward with a cooperative: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/3XH96NJ. Finally, would you please help us spread the word by forwarding this email to your urban farmer contacts? With gratitude, The Gypsy Farm Bus 720.333.5283gypsyfarmbus@gmail.comwww.gypsyfarmbus.com (under construction)
 My name is Frieda and I am the sole proprietor of Strange Grounds Coffee House. I just opened the doors in May, and although it is a lot of hard work and long hours, I love it and hope it will become a place where people come to relax and enjoy the things I cook and serve. It has been the culmination of a life of dreams and hopes, but in all honesty I don't think I would have ever been able to start a business if I hadn't started participating in the HaHo. The thing is, I'm painfully shy and awkward. I've been a stay at home mom for the past seven years, and I very rarely left my house. I compulsively craft things. I sew, cook, bake, throw pottery, and glue random stuff to other stuff. But only for my small group of friends and family. Then a friend linked me to the HaHo website, and I thought about it, and after the summer was over I was still thinking about it, and when the 2010 Holiday HaHo came around I signed up, and it was terrifying. It was also wonderful. And I kept going, through the spring and summer of 2011, and every time I went I felt a little more at home, and a little more part of a community. The response has been so positive, everyone is upbeat and people actually want to know about the things I do, and share what they do and love. And the friends that I have made, through my association with the HaHo community, and the feeling that what I had to offer was worthwhile, allowed me to see that maybe I could do all the crazy things I wanted to do. So now, I have a coffee shop, and it's awesome and terrifying and wonderful, and I would never have been able to do it without having been a part of the community here. And I hope to continue to be a part, and maybe help someone else feel the positive support that helped me. So thank you, HaHo community. Just for everything.
Thanks to all those who came to the Town Hall meeting this past week, to Green Spaces for hosting us, and to Strange Grounds for bringing coffee, chai and hot cocoa for us to sip on while we talked! We will definitely be having more of these, so if you wanted to come but missed it, check back with us and stay tuned - we'll let you know when the next one is coming up. At this meeting we went over changes to the Vendor Sign Out Fee percentages, the HaHo's expenses and revenue year-to-date as well as some upcoming expenses, volunteer opportunities, and some of the feedback we had received from the Town Hall earlier this year as well as from the May market. Here's more detail on what we discussed: Vendor Sign Out Fee Percentages: In response to the fact that many vendors feel that 20% on their market-day revenue is simply too high, we've decided to make a change to the sign-out fee percentages. The new sign out fees will be structured thusly:
- Up to $50, 5% of revenue
- $51-$100, 10% of revenue
- $101-$200, 15% of revenue- For every dollar over $200 made, 20% We hope that this will ease some of the sign out fee for our vendors making over $200, but also help the market to maintain and even grow a bit (the consensus seems to be that most people want us to grow at least a bit)!
HaHo Finances: At the previous Town Hall meeting, we heard loud and clear that folks are interested in more financial transparency. In response, we provided everyone in attendance at this month's Town Hall with a Year-to-Date (YTD) Profit and Loss (P&L) Statement. We're figuring out how best to present this information for all to see on the website, but in the meantime, we are willing and able to provide it to anyone interested! There are expenses that haven't been incurred by the market in the past, that we simply must consider going forward and which are not reflected in the YTD P&L.
Volunteer Positions: At the moment, we have a lot of tasks, and not that many hands! We want the HaHo community to stay vibrant, and by having more people involved we can be stronger and do more for the community. If you would like to take a greater role in the HaHo, we'd love to have you, your expertise, your commitment, and your enthusiasm! You can see more about the positions/tasks we have here.
Feedback from Future of HaHo Town Hall: - Many want to see the market grow, many would like a cap of some sort on that growth
- Larger space, vendor workspaces
- Increased number of markets per year – year round
- Meet basic everyday needs of people, not just craft/prepared foods.
- Higher attendance from public
- More locations around the city
- Increased advertising
- Expanded workshops on how to start a new business
- Offer grants or small loans to new businesses
- Commercial kitchen and workspaces for vendors
- Serving as a example for other start up markets – aiding them in the process
- Expanded skill-sharing directory
- Expand on ways in which community members can participate and contribute
- Expanded bartering opportunities - Expansion of use of Denver Dough - More involvement in community – donation drives, food and clothing banks, etc. - Vendor workshops on cooking, gardening, how-to, etc.
- Educate public on food issues – GMOs, organic foods, local production, etc.
- Outreach to local high schools, internship programs for students to learn about business and supporting local community - More and more varied music
- Other performing arts during market
- Update website
Feedback from May Market (that differs from above):
- Coffee and tea vendor.
- Recycling, compost and trash bins in a central location.
- The back kitchen sink was pretty dirty and may leave a bad impression on customers.
- Adjust vendor sign out fee brackets
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