Downtown night market gets smaller (for now) hoping to get better

Nearly two months in, the DoMo Night Market on 10th Street continues to find its way, but organizers and a cross section of vendors expressed confidence it will get bigger and better.

It’s smaller than when it began June 2 on the two blocks between I and K streets with about 40 vendor tents. It now more compactly fits about 30 tents on the one block between J and K.

“Last week, we decided we had started out with not quite enough vendors to fill two blocks and were hoping it would grow to two blocks right out of the gate, but it hasn’t done that,” said Josh Bridegroom, chief executive officer of the Downtown Modesto Partnership. “So we decided until it could, we wanted to increase the vibrancy of the market and have a strong rhythm of vendors” by fitting it on one block.

From the start, one of the goals of the market was to complement and support the brick-and-mortar businesses along both blocks, Bridegroom said. To build back out will require recruiting more vendors.

“Vendors are gun-shy of new markets, though, so we’re offering the first four weeks free to those who commit to coming at least four weeks,” he said. Any new vendors who do not take part all four weeks will have to pay booth fees for the times they took part.

The offer is open to any vendors, but DoMo is particularly interested in artists and craftspeople.

“This is fundamentally a different type of market than the morning farmers market,” Bridegroom explained. “We still want produce, but we want it to be a smaller component.”

The DoMo Night Market is meant to have a greater mix of food vendors, artisans and entertainment. Last week, in addition to live music outside Ralston’s Goat, there was a beanbag toss outside Brenden Theatres, as well as face painting.

“Everyone in Modesto was excited about trying to have a night market that was successful and more than just a farmers market, more of a city market or a family market for local vendors and artisans,” added Sheila Burch, selling honey at her Burch Bees booth Thursday.

To spread the word to artisans, Elliot Begoun and Lynn Dickerson of the Downtown Modesto Partnership board of directors recently handed out fliers at the Stockmarket in Stockton, while Bridegroom did the same at the Renegade Craft Fair in San Francisco.

Vendors who take part in those cities’ events would be “perfect” for DoMo, Bridegroom said: “Crafters who are getting to the next level (beyond being hobbyists), getting serious about turning it into a business.”

But the market doesn’t want to exclude the hobbyists, either, and organizers want to encourage those who aren’t up to participating every week to consider sharing booths. Perhaps four crafters could try the four-weeks-free offer by each taking a week, Bridegroom said, or two could split a month.

“I think that could really work out,” he said.

Thursday, there were at least two new nonfood vendors at the market. Denise Key of Modesto brought her Purse Diva handbags. A friend on the downtown partnership board, Rose Louis, said DoMo was looking for quality vendors, “so I accepted the invitation,” said Key, who works a lot of rodeo-related events and recently sold at Baconfest in Lathrop.

“We’ve actually done pretty well in the short time we’ve been here,” she said about an hour into Thursday night’s market.

And Polly Young of Ceres, at her Crystals, Beads and Tie-Dyed T’s booth, said she was excited to have an opportunity to introduce more people to her works.

Donna and Lane Hudson of Waterford, selling her Donna’s Designs jewelry, have been doing the morning markets for five or six years.

“This is still building,” Lane Hudson said of the night market. “There are good days and bad. We think it’s going to eventually start really picking up.”

He sounded a little less optimistic when he added, “We’ll find out in the next two or three weeks whether it’s going to work or not. If it got bad enough,” he said, they’d probably return to just working the morning markets.

Vendor consistency will be important to the market’s success, Burch predicted. And for shopper appeal, she agreed that a bigger arts-and-craft presence would be nice.

“Whenever you’re starting something new, you have to figure out what works, what doesn’t,” she said. “A lot of the people here have been doing markets a long time, and so we are actually a pretty good resource. We all have our ideas about what makes a good market. It has to be comfortable for the vendors and the customers, so that keeps everybody happy.”

The first week of the night market was “OK,” she said, but her sales have declined each week since. Burch is in a good position to wait for the evening crowd to build, though, because unlike fresh produce vendors, she has a product – honey – that doesn’t go bad.

“I just lose my time,” she said. “If I had to send an employee out, it might be different.”

Keeping vendors and customers alike happy also may mean some eventual changes to the market’s hours, which now are 5 to 9 p.m. Karen Johnson of Dale’s Gourmet Kettle Popcorn observed that so far, night market crowds haven’t picked up until about 7:30 or 8, but “that’s the time some vendors have had it for the day and they’re wanting to get going.”

Bridegroom confirmed that the busiest time for the market is between 7 and 8:30 p.m., when shadows fall on Tenth Street Plaza and it’s cooler. But DoMo vendors and organizers still want to harness the shopping power of the many employees who work in the Tenth Street Place city-county complex and get off during the market’s first hour, he said.

One idea is to push toward offering specials to city and county employees, Bridegroom said. So while a change in hours has been discussed, the 5-to-9 schedule will remain in place for at least this fall season (the goal is for the market eventually to be year-round) and “we’ll continue to work on the marketing and culture of the market to make it vibrant and exciting.”

This story was originally published July 24, 2016 at 6:37 PM with the headline "Downtown night market gets smaller (for now) hoping to get better."