How much does a vintage market days franchise cost

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Friday, May 18, 2018 - 10:00am to Sunday, May 20, 2018 - 5:00pm

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Vintage Market Days is bringing the vintage experience to The Midlands of The Palmetto State. Vintage Market Days® is a three-day upscale, open-air vintage event is taking the nation by storm and will once again be in beautiful Camden, SC.

According to regional Vintage Market Days® franchise owners Pete and Ruth Rauch, the Columbia Metro Vintage Market Days® event "Simply Vintage" will be held at the Camden City Arena May 18-20th. Showcasing local and national talent, the event will feature approximately 100 vendors from across the country with vintage inspired home décor, handmade jewelry, art, music and plenty of homemade food.

Vintage Market Days® is a three-day upscale vintage-inspired indoor/outdoor market featuring original art, antiques, clothing, jewelry, handmade treasures, home decor, outdoor furnishings, consumable yummies, seasonal plantings and a little more. The market began in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 2011 as a pop-up event, and by 2014 it had grown to eight locations across five states. Now there are more than 60 Vintage Market Days® franchises across the country.

The Rauch's, owners of Vintage Market Days® of Columbia Metro (who also own Ivy House Antique Mall in Columbia, SC) have the Columbia Metro market franchise that includes Richland, Kershaw, Lexington, Fairfield, Newberry, Calhoun and Sumter counties. The event in Camden will be the second time Vintage Market Days® has come to the Midlands of South Carolina. "We knew that there wasn't an event like this in The Midlands, so we were thrilled to be able to purchase a franchise for our area," said Ruth Rauch.

Vintage Market Days® - "Simply Vintage" is expected to draw more than 3,000 shoppers a day throughout the weekend. Vintage Market Days Columbia Metro will be showcasing true vintage items, items that are vintage-inspired and a lot of repurposed vintage items - there will be furniture galore, custom art and food trucks out the wazoo. People associate Camden with vintage history and antiques so this city is a very special place for the vintage experience. Vintage Market Days® is super excited to be returning again to the beautiful, antique town of Camden, SC. To keep up with other details follow us on Facebook www.facebook.com/VintageMarketDaysColumbiaMetro/

Location

The Camden City Arena 517 Bull Street, Camden, SC 29020

Fee or Admissions Info

Pricing to be announced

Contact Name

Ruth Rauch

Contact Phone Number

803-873-7467

Contact Email Address

Website

www.facebook.com/VintageMarketDaysColumbiaMetro/

What began as a small Tulsa-area flea market in 2012 has turned into a national franchise system with markets in 60 markets across 25 states. Vintage Market Days owner and co-founder Dianna Brown of Owasso recently spoke with TulsaPeople ahead of the Tulsa show April 29-May 1 at the Creek County Fairgrounds, 17816 W. OK in Kellyville.

BONUS: On April 22 only, click here to purchase discounted advance tickets for the upcoming Tulsa show. 

How do you explain the show to someone who has never heard of Vintage Market Days?

Oh, gosh, that’s a great question. When people come to a Vintage Market Days event, we want them to feel, to smell, to taste, to see, to touch — all of those different senses. We want you to feel like you’re not in a typical shopping setting. … The vintage experience is very special and unique, and it’s something you can’t get anywhere else. If I were a customer, it’s what I would want to experience.

From a personal perspective, it was a little dream of mine. I wanted to bring something unique and special to the area because we didn’t have something like that here in Oklahoma. I would always go to Texas to Canton (Trade Days flea market), places like that. And I knew there was nothing like that here many years ago. I’ve always had a love for vintage and repurposing, since I was a little girl. I had a little store before Vintage Market Days started. But (VMD) really is bringing the vintage experience to a community.

You have a great diversity of vendors at the events. What goes into creating that perfect mix?

First of all, I’m so glad you noticed that because we work really hard to do that. I have been the person who has picked the vendors for Tulsa from the very, very beginning. When people walk into the event, I want them to at first glance be overwhelmed with the vintage or the repurposed or the upcycled. When you walk in, I want you to know you’re not going to get something you can get anywhere else. And so that’s my first priority when I’m picking vendors. That vendor has something unique and special that another person can’t get and sell.

If I had my way, it would be 100% vintage and upcycled and repurposed, but it’s getting harder and harder to find vendors like that because it’s hard for them to make a lot of money in that world or with those types of products. So we have to find a way to balance that out. And that’s where the other vendors come into play. We have ratios that we follow that is part of our system, which I created. We like for 75% of our vendors to be vintage, upcycled, repurposed, handmade; and then 25% are made up of food and clothing, and lotions and soaps and candles and that kind of stuff. Like I said, I wish it could be 100% vintage, but it’s hard to find vendors to fill the entire event up because the customers want more and more vendors to choose from.

When we started the event at Kellyville, we had one barn. Now we are up to three full barns that are literally full  with over 200 booths.

As a vendor, I imagine it takes an incredible amount of time to go out and do the picking to find the things you then want to curate for your own booth and resell.

Yes, and it’s also so hard to control the price point. If you go to market and you buy something, you’re going to be able to get that same product over and over again at a certain cost, and you know you can sell it at this (price) point. Well, when you’re talking about unique items that the vintage home and goods vendors sell, they can’t control the cost of those products in the beginning, so it’s harder for them to make it financially. The ones that do it do it really, really, really well. They have it down to a science.

You mentioned you used to own a store. Tell me about that.

Well, my husband and I moved to Tulsa when we first got married in 1994. And believe it or not, we bought and sold four houses on one street in Florence Park. We were flipping old houses before we really knew that’s what it was called. So our love for vintage really started there in Tulsa with flipping those older homes and selling them. And then when we had our first child, we moved out to Owasso but were still very active in the Tulsa area. Owasso has gotten a bit bigger now, so we are able to do some of our (VMD) stuff here. But my store was actually in Collinsville. I wanted that little tiny downtown/hometown-type feeling, and Collinsville fit the bill. It was called Simply Vintage.

You’ve had this love for vintage since you were a child, but what made you want to turn that interest into a show? Plus, since you franchised, it has blown up. What were your goals 10 years ago?

My goal at the time was just doing what I love to do. When I had the store, Simply Vintage, I had several people who were vendors who would bring stuff in, and I would buy it from them or they would consign it with me to sell. A lot of those people actually ended up being vendors at Vintage Market Days. And then eventually (some) turned into franchisees because they were with us from the very beginning.

When we started this, I had a business partner initially, and she and I worked together for seven years. The past three years I’ve been doing it on my own. When we started all of it, it was never intended to be what it is today at the scale that it is, but the demand of it and the timing of it were what kind of forced us into the growth. So as the demand came, we just grew with it.

At the time when we started this and even still today, there isn’t another franchise system that does what we do in the vintage world. It was really never my intention to get it to the size it is now, but I’m so glad it has gotten there because it’s allowed so many people to benefit from Vintage Market Days, whether financially or emotionally because it’s a really fun place to be. The relationships and the community, all of that that comes along with it is, is a positive thing for people, especially now with where the world is. It’s an escape. But it was never my intention for it to get to where it is.

We had the first two events in Bixby, and then we ended up going to downtown Tulsa for two events in some old warehouses that we repurposed into event venues, which was interesting. But as we were doing all of that, we were just having people coming to us and saying, “We want to do this. How do you do it?” And then we thought, “Well, we may have a business here.” People would say, “I’d like to take this to the community I grew up in,” or, “Can you teach me how to do it so I could take it to Oklahoma City; or St. Louis; or Bentonville, Arkansas; or Texas?” Those were some of our very first ones. Those were all vendors who started out with us early on or in the very beginning. And so … that just gradually and on its own organically grew into a franchise system.

How did you know how to grow into the franchise system?

Well, we had some previous business experience where we had some things that had been licensed, which is where you basically can use someone’s name. And so we initially started off with licensing (VMD) because we had someone in our circle who had done that before, and we kind of learned from that. Then once it grew past licensing, we were able to move into franchising. And again, we just had someone within our circle who knew a little bit about franchising, so that kind of put us in the right direction. Really it was an attorney who took it from there and knew the ins and outs of it.

But the actual system, which is what’s franchised, is what we started with and what we created. That’s really the nuts and bolts of what we do … from all the details that go into it, all the vendors, all the marketing. There’s a lot we have gotten all the bugs worked out of. And so no one can take our system or our model and duplicate that in other communities. It was really the system that we created organically.

I was a special education teacher and a school psychometrist before … So I had created systems many, many times because of the classroom. Then, I also had my store. And so taking what I learned from education and the psychology that I had to use day in and day out with the school systems really ended up paying off because I use the psychology every single day. Creating the systems was something that was just somewhat organic because of the teaching background. 

The theme of the upcoming show is “Let’s Eat Cake.” How do you choose the themes?

The theme is our point of inspiration, and there’s usually some kind of meaning behind it. “Let’s Eat Cake,” of course, comes from celebrating our 10-year anniversary. We want to come up with something that is fun and creative, and that goes along with the color schemes that we like. We’ve always thought of it like this: We’re planning a party. And so, what’s the theme of the party? That’s where the entrance has come into play. Since you’ve been to the event, you’ve seen the front entrances and how we try to transform that into whatever that theme is. And then the vendors kind of take it and make their booths into that same kind of theme.

Is there anything you can share in the way of trends or things that are really hot right now that you can find at VMD?

One of the things I’ve always collected is vintage design books, like for interior design. And honestly, when you look back at those old vintage or design books from the ’70s and the’80s, it’s all coming back around again. I can find pictures in there that represent a lot of things you might see now in CB2 magazine or in a Restoration Hardware magazine. If you watch what was popular in the ’70s and the ’80s, that’s what’s coming back around. It’s all cyclical, of course, but right now (the current style is) very clean, very minimalistic, very straight lines — a little bit of curvy to it — but really it’s a lot of a minimal type, vintage or monochromatic, where it’s all the same color scheme.

I like to take what I see that’s current, but then put a vintage or a repurposed twist to it. One of the things I do — that I did for this event — is to go and get hundreds of books. You take off the (dust) covering of the book, and there’s a color underneath. So you’re going to have a big stack of blue books and a big stack of red books and pink books. You can take a collection of vintage white books, and put it on a shelf and it looks very current. Or I could use red books or blue books. So sure, take off the covers, and there you have a repurposed item that’s very, very current. You can do the same thing with furniture or anything.

What else do you want to touch on regarding the show?

Well, we do have a nonprofit associated with our event — we always have. Some people may not realize that. Part of our proceeds go to a nonprofit called Branch 15-Eastern Oklahoma. … They’re associated with Life Church, and there are several locations across the state where women are able to go in and receive support after coming out of hard situations to be able to get back on their feet. It’s a really, really neat organization. So we’re happy to support that.

I also like to not let it go without being said that Vintage Market Days is still very much a small family-owned business. And every vendor in there is a small business. The majority — 75% to 85% — are local to the Tulsa area. And so I want customers to understand that when they come to Vintage Market Days, they really are supporting over 100 small businesses. A lot of these vendors really benefit and rely on the income they receive during these events. For the majority of them, it is their primary source of income. Even though we’re a franchise system, (VMD is) still very much a family-owned business, and there are many people in their family businesses that will benefit from their participation.