Makers Market at Northwest Tune-Up Festival

When: Friday, July 11th - Sunday July 13th | Time TBD (load-in and set-up on Thursday, July 10th)

Where: Bellingham Waterfront - Granary and Laurel Ave

Link to application at the bottom! 

NW Tune-up is a mountain biking, craft brews and music festival, and the vision is super-ambitious! The team that started it in 2022 has a vision to turn it into a premier, world-class mountain biking festival, with bikers coming from all over the country to attend and received a three-year City of Bellingham grant to get started. Sponsored athletes participated in races up at Galbraith, they brought in bands from all over the country, and craft brewers from all over the PNW.

As Bellingham Makers Market, we are honored to be entrusted with hosting the makers market. We believe in NW Tune-Up, and we’re excited to be part of it in these early years because we fully expect that each year will be bigger and better than the one before.

The organizers have been wonderfully responsive to our suggestions, and we are continuing to work together to make this a successful market for everyone. 

Who should apply for the Makers Market at Northwest Tune-Up? 

• You are a handmade maker.
• Your products have a fun, festival-ish, summery vibe.
• You make something that appeals to an outdoorsy, active crowd.
• You live here in the Pacific Northwest.
• You and your booth setup are happy to deal with wind, dust, seagulls, potential rain, a longish walk to the vendor parking lot, and all the things that go along with a big outdoor event.

Important Dates:

• Application deadline: 5/19/2025
• Notification of application status – either accepted, waitlist, or declined: 5/30/2025
• Vending fees and CORRECT insurance documents will be due: TBD. We suggest you submit your vending fees and insurance documents well in advance of the deadline so that we can contact you if there are any issues.
• Vending fees become non-refundable on 6/26/2025, no exceptions.
• Market hours are TBD, but you can expect to be there full days on Saturday and Sunday, and maybe a somewhat shorter day on Friday.  
  • Load-in: all tents must be set up on Thursday, July 10th. Due to road closure times, we will not be able to accommodate vendors setting up on Friday morning before the event starts. The exact set-up hours are TBD, but most likely they will be from lunchtime to early evening. You will be able to bring your vehicles in during the set-up window.
  • Load-out time: All load-out will take place on Sunday evening after the market closes. We do not have the option of leaving tents up until Monday morning. We will announce the load-out times as soon as we are informed when vehicles can enter the area, but expect that it could be a late evening. Vendors are not permitted to start breaking down before the market closes on Sunday evening. Any vendors breaking down early will not be accepted in future markets we host.

Other Important Details:

• Application fee: $10 - This is non-refundable and covers our time to review and curate applications.
• Vending fees: 
  • 10 x10 booth - $250
  • 10 x 20 booth (if available) - $500
• This market is open to handmade makers, artists and artisans. Handmade means that the product was physically created by the seller. Obviously in the process of hand-making our items, all of us use some bought supplies and components. But we want to showcase vendors who are pouring their creative energies into what they sell. If you are the designer, but the manufacturing of the product is outsourced to a third party, please let us know.
• Your business must be registered in WA and you must have a UBI number and be able to collect your own sales tax.
• We believe that having our vendors promote the market is key to bringing the shoppers!  Participating vendors are required to promote the market on their social media at least three out of four designated times. We will email you four different times with a graphic and suggested text for you to post that day or the next day. We will do our part too! We will advertise on local online events calendars, reach out to news sources, put up poster and flyers, and contact our growing list of shoppers who gave us their emails to learn about upcoming markets.
• You must be reachable via email. All notifications and reminders will be sent via email from BMM@bellinghammakersmarket.com. When you fill out the application form, please enter an email address that you check regularly. If you miss a deadline because an email went to your spam, junk or gmail's 'promotions' folder, we will assume that you are no longer interested in participating, and will offer your place to a vendor on the waitlist.
• The booth photo is a required part of your application. We will not consider your application without a booth photo. We want to see your products beautifully displayed in your canopy, with all your signage. If you haven't created a booth photo before, there are lots of tips online. We will be using this photo to help us understand the quantity and variety of products you sell, and to visualize how it will look in a row of booths. Impress us!
• There will be extra insurance endorsements required by the City of Bellingham and the Port of Bellingham. Last year this cost some of us $70-$90 extra, depending on our insurance companies. These included waivers of subrogation, primary and noncontributory, and specific language (not boilerplate) from the City about indemnification. We are now set up as affiliates with Veracity Insurance, the parent company of ACT, FLIP, HSCG, and more, so we can walk you through the process, but we just wanted to warn you that it will be a bit more complicated than just adding additional insureds. We will be offering a discount code if you purchase insurance through our affiliate link.
• In the application, we will be asking why your items are a great fit for the folks coming to a bikes, beers and bands festival. It's definitely family-friendly, with lots of activities for little kids, (plenty of kids start "mountain biking" on strider bikes when they can't even ride a pedal bike yet!) but the festival generally has a certain overall vibe of a Pacific Northwest crowd. Why will those people love your items?
• This is a three-day event. No one will be permitted to break down early, so if you sell out, you still need to be present at your booth, interacting with the shoppers, for the rest of the event. As always, starting to tear down early will cause you to not be accepted for our future BMM's markets.
• Because this event involves the City and Port, certain things will be very strict. For example, fire marshals will check tent weights and could ask you to add more if they aren’t heavy enough. It can get very windy down by the water, so once we tell accepted vendors what the required amount of weight will be, we suggest you weigh your weights so you don't have an unpleasant surprise if the fire marshal weighs them.
• Canopies are required, with 40 pounds of weight per leg. 
• There is no electricity available. You may use an electric generator. Gas generators are not allowed.

This application process is competitive. We are beyond delighted that our little event hosting company has become known for putting on quality markets. Thank you, Bellingham makers, for all the support! But this also means that it is becoming more competitive to get in. Our list of interested vendors continues to grow, with over 1000 on our email list and 4200 followers on Instagram. We value accepting some vendors that are new to us at each market, as well as including vendors who have participated in our past markets. We aim to offer a rich and diverse experience for shoppers at our events, ensuring there is something unique and enjoyable for everyone! 

So please think of your application the way you would think of a job application. You are trying to persuade us with your photos and your written answers why we should select you. Even if you know us personally, please answer as though we don't remember you or your products at all. We want to see by your photos that your products are high quality and that your booth looks professional and that you have plenty of inventory, attractive signage, etc. We have to make a lot of difficult decisions as we go through our curating process. Just because you participated in one of our previous markets is not a guarantee of acceptance. Our focus is to bring together the highest quality experience for shoppers that we can, gathered from all the amazing talent in our area.

In order to help you fill out your application, here are some things that are difficult for us when we are curating. You might be surprised at how many of these things we come across in every batch of applications, and it influences your score. Please double check the details! Here are some common mistakes:

• Typing in an email address or phone number incorrectly - 
• Not filling in your last name (We need to know your first and last name for insurance purposes).
• Giving us a phone number that can’t receive texts
• Leaving questions blank or answering with just a word or two
• Submitting photos that don’t show products or booth clearly
• Submitting photos in formats other than JPG (please don’t submit .heic, which is the Apple compressed file format)
• Paying the application fee with an account that is not obviously your name or your business name, and forgetting to email us to let us know

Vendors are not grandfathered in because they were accepted to a previous BMM market. 

Because we are hosting this in conjunction with NW Tune-up, we don't get to make all the decisions, and pretty much anything we said here is subject to change.

We're so excited to put together an amazing art market! We feel so honored that NW Tune-Up asked us and that they're entrusting us with the incredible opportunity!

Warmly,

Stephanie, Cynthia and Stephanie

Apply Now!