Even when Monica Martino was “broke and couldn’t afford anything,” she loved roaming the stalls at New York City’s holiday markets.
“I used to walk around and just think it must be so magical for these people to be out here in these little jewel boxes selling their stuff,” she said.
Now Ms. Martino, 53, sits in a jewel box herself. Six years ago, she started a business, Lemon Zesty, making tote bags and other items printed with sassy images of her own creation. (She calls it “fresh art with a sour twist.”) This year, she was selling her wares in a stall at the Bank of America Winter Village at Bryant Park, one of New York’s largest seasonal markets, with some four million visitors.
Black Friday marks the start to the holiday shopping season, traditionally observed with bone-crushing, bargain-hunting trips to big retailers and department stores.
But in holiday markets, small businesses are the focus, said Evan Shelton, senior vice president of Urbanspace, which hosts holiday markets in New York City. The company oversees outdoor markets, including in Bryant Park, Columbus Circle and the Union Square Holiday Market, which started in 1993 and is the longest-running market in the city. This year, Urbanspace also coordinated an indoor market at Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street for the first time in its 166-year history.
The shopping bonanza that is called Black Friday now starts well before Thanksgiving and continues with online sales through Cyber Monday (though, of course, there will be holiday sales up until Christmas). The Saturday that follows Black Friday became known as Small Business Saturday in 2010, and consumers are encouraged to shop at small and local businesses. It’s also one of the core days of the holiday market season, Mr. Shelton said.
Ms. Martino does about 80 to 90 percent of her sales for the year during the holiday markets, so she pours hours of work into gearing up for this exact moment. Whether she’ll experience a Black Friday bump as she has in past years remains to be seen. But, Ms. Martino noted, “everyone in the world comes to this part of town, so I’m expecting it to be busy.”
As soon as this year is over, she’ll “hibernate” for the rest of January before beginning preparations for the 2025 holiday shopping season.
“The economy matters less than the weather,” Eldon Scott, the president of Urbanspace, said of the outdoor markets. “People tend to come out and want to be at the market.”
It was a rainy day in November when Allison Larimore stepped into Ms. Martino’s booth, drawn by her quirky art.
“It’s my sense of humor, and it reminded me of a friend back home, so I bought her a gift,” Ms. Larimore said.
Visiting New York from Seattle, Ms. Larimore, a research nurse who also makes handmade surgical scrub caps, said she liked to go in and out of the booths, asking vendors if they were the artists behind the products.
It “just makes it a little bit more wholesome,” she said. “More important to spend my money there.”
A small-business laboratory
Holiday markets, commonly held outdoors under twinkling lights, have long provided small businesses with a boost and customers with a festive experience.
“Shopping around the holidays should be experiential because people are into it,” said Barbara Kahn, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
“Even Santa Claus is an experiential thing,” she said. “The Thanksgiving Day parade, holiday music — it all puts you in the mood. And holiday markets, I think, are part of that.”
At Bryant Park, there is ice skating, a large holiday tree, curling and cozy igloos, in addition to roughly 200 vendors. About 30 percent of them sell food, and the rest are hawking a variety of items made for gifting, including jewelry, socks, handbags, clothing and home goods.
The number of holiday shops at the park has grown steadily in the 23 years since the market’s inception, said Irene Vagianos Whelan, the vice president of brand partnerships and events at Bryant Park.
Most of the shops are small businesses, she said, noting that many owners even started their businesses at the park. Bank of America, which teams up with the park to host the annual winter extravaganza, gives four minority-owned businesses with under $1 million in revenue rent-free spaces in the market for two weeks during its peak season.
“We really try to launch their business,” Ms. Vagianos Whelan said. “We’ve had a couple of them turn into real vendors in the market.”
Rent varies for the other vendors, she said, but everybody is generally on a percentage deal, “so if the vendor does well, we do well. If the vendor doesn’t do well, they don’t suffer.” (Neither she nor Urbanspace would offer specifics about rent or entry costs.)
Lisa Devo, a co-owner of the Soap & Paper Factory, which is based in Nyack, N.Y., has sold her fragrant wares at holiday markets for years. She also sells her goods at retailers (Barnes & Noble, Paper Source and others), but the markets let her meet customers in the flesh.
“I love selling because I love people,” she said, adding, “When our customers come in, we hug. It’s so nice, and they want to see us succeed, and they want to support local business.”
Holiday markets make up about 20 percent of her sales for the year, Ms. Devo said, giving her the space to experiment with new items.
“It is very, very helpful for me to be here and look at what people are asking for, and talk to people about what they want,” she said. Roughly 80 percent of vendors return to Urbanspace’s markets, Mr. Shelton, the company’s senior vice president, said.
For Luca Meacci, the owner of Casa Toscana, a Tuscan eatery, holiday markets provided a lifeline during the coronavirus pandemic. His two storefronts in New York City, which relied on office workers and tourists, had to close. But a booth at the Bryant Park market in 2020 allowed him to stay in business. Mr. Meacci, 42, now has two shops again and booths in several of Urbanspace’s holiday markets.
“Without the holiday market, I wouldn’t be able to be here,” he said, standing outside his booth inside Macy’s. “I’m very grateful for it.”
‘The tree, the vibes, it’s so cozy’
Suzanne Kanj and her sister, Nina, were visiting the Bryant Park market on a rainy Friday night when they stopped into Ms. Devo’s booth, calling its scent “magnetic.”
The sisters, who live in New York City and have visited the market for the past five years, said they come to eat the pasta that’s made by another vendor in a Parmesan wheel and to drink hot chocolate.
“The tree, the vibes, it’s so cozy,” Ms. Kanj said.
A few booths away, Sasha Sherman and his team were roasting chestnuts in an electric oven (no open fire here). A man on a mission, Mr. Sherman, 35, is trying to revive the American chestnut treats by instilling a taste for them in customers.
During late fall and winter, he ships boxes of chestnuts harvested in Ohio and upstate New York — some 10,000 pounds this year — to purchasers around the country. His business, the Great Chestnut Experiment, has a number of pop-ups and other markets under its belt, but this is its first time at Bryant Park.
Mr. Sherman and his team dole out fresh roasted chestnuts and baked goods like chestnut swirled brownies and chestnut brown butter cakes. If it’s your first time ever having a chestnut, you get to ring a bell.
Holiday markets are the best place to bring chestnuts back into American culture, Mr. Sherman said, because, “fundamentally, chestnuts are, throughout the world, a food that is traditionally consumed around the holidays.” That time of year, he said, is “when they peak in their flavor.”
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