Makers Market at NW Tune-Up Festival

When: Friday, July 12th - Sunday July 14th | Time TBD

Where: Bellingham Waterfront - Granary and Laurel Ave

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 trying some new things this summer. One of the best changes from last year is that the makers market tents will have a much better, more visible location, with close proximity to all the festival happenings. Also, the general public will be able to see our tents when they drive by on Roeder and Chestnut. We are investing in more signage, including tall feather signs, and we are working with the Tune-Up team to direct people to the makers market with their signage as well.

Another great change is that the Tune-Up team is going to be doing a lot more promoting of the makers market on their website. They really want to have this as part of the festival and want to make sure they continuously ask us what they can do to help it be successful for all our vendors.

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 reside in Washington state.
• You and your booth setup are happy to deal with potential wind, dust, seagulls, (though not as much as last year because we won’t be near the Boardmill Building), 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: 5/1/2024.
• Notification of application status – either accepted, waitlist, or declined: Mid-May.
• 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 6/27/2024, 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 11th. 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: $15 - 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. The emails will go out to you on 6/21, 6/28, 7/5 and 7/12. We will do our part too and advertise on local online events calendars, reach out to news sources, put up posters 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.
  • Do not refuse emails from BMM! There is a tab on the sidebar called Email Settings, and if you click on it, there is a checked box authorizing you to receive emails from BMM. Do not uncheck it! 
• 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.
• You must reside in Washington State to be a vendor. The organizers of NW Tune-up want to showcase the talent of our corner of the state.
• Canopies are required.
• Participating vendors can look forward to incredible perks, including exposure to a diverse audience from across the country and two tickets to experience the entire NWTU festival, complete with music, biking, and brews!

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. We had so many applications for our holiday markets that we split the accepted vendors into two groups and only assigned each vendor to one market, and still had a long waitlist. 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 answers to the questions why we should select you. 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. 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.

CLICK LINK BELOW TO APPLY:

NWTU Makers Market Application

If you have questions about the application, feel free to email us at bmm@bellinghammakersmarket.com. 

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. But hopefully this gives you enough information to consider whether you are going to apply. We don't want to scare anyone off from applying, but we also want to be upfront about the requirements.

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