Hi! I applied back in February as a new vendor and wanted to know more about the turnaround time for denial/acceptance or do you have to continuously reapply for specific weekends?
Hi - everyone is added to the waitlist, and when spots open within your specific product category the onboarding team will reach out. No need to reapply multiple times - duplicates get deleted, but sometimes the original entry is tossed which actually moves you backwards in the process.
Depending on the category, it can take months or years to receive an entry point. Holidays are in larger venues, so often more accessible, but again - product category balance is part of the math.
Hi Chris! Thanks so much for this information.
Hello! Thank you for clarifying the process. Connie Adams
Hello,
Chris, could you clarify the entry points and product categories, please. I’m in a similar place as the OP, I applied in Feb. I had spoken to a member of the staff in 2025 about my product and received positive feedback, encouragement to apply, and mention that the market hadn’t had the product before. Though it is a food product.
So, to help me, I’ve gone through the handbook and not seen a straight list of categories. I may have in a subsection, but just don’t recall where.
How can I know if the category I’m in is full?
How does an entry point arise and how would I know if I’m on the waiting list?
If I am on a waiting list, can anyone advise me about potential waitlist times for my category?
I’ve stopped by the Aquarium market the last two weeks in the afternoon but didn’t see staff. I do plan to speak with staff once the market opens at the pavilion.
Any information is helpful. I’ve spent a bit of money to be ready and gotten my permits and licenses together. I really didn’t think it might take “months or years” to receive an entry point. I might have approached this differently.
Thanks for your time and any help you can provide.
Hi Patrick,
It’s a good question, although not one easily answered with a quick list or response. There are loads of individual steps, nuances, waiting periods and human factors involved. I’ll try to walk through the generic sequence so that you get an idea as to how much effort is involved in this very critical process.
First, let’s define the various stages of a Vendor with the Market:
Has Idea → applies to join market → Waitlist → invited to join → Under Review → provides all necessary documentation → Approved Vendor → registers/attends events → Active Vendor → stops attending → Inactive Vendor
So in answer to one of your questions, “Am I on the waiting list?”, literally everyone starts out on the waiting list. That’s because another of your questions, “How can I know if a category is full?” is answered by the fact that all categories are technically full from the get-go. It’s only through vendor attrition that new opportunities open up.
[Jumping ahead, to your question about not finding a market manager – ask a vendor, if they have attended at least once they should know where the managers are.]
So, the next series of questions pertain to how long does it take to move from the Waitlist into an Approved Vendor status? To be candid, we don’t know ourselves - there are a lot of factors involved. But let’s walk through it, and maybe it will add clarity.
- Our smallest market has space for about 14 vendors, and there currently are 72 vendors approved to register for that location. Naturally, it tends to sell out – but there are 72 vendors approved because that’s where it took before it started to fill completely. Not every vendor attends every market every week, as we only require vendors to attend once/year to remain active. New vendor acceptance to that location is currently halted, at least until a booth stays empty for a cycle or two – that tells us that we need to allow more people into the mix.
- When will that occur? No clue - things change in waves. It might be next month, it might be next season.
- When we do have those new spots open up, what category will they be from? No clue here either – it depends a bit on what product categories dropped out, how well they were doing, and what the perceived need is for something new. As an example, if we have nine bread bakers and a cookie maker stopped attending – we probably won’t add another bread baker. We would instead scan for a new cookie maker, or at least something a bit different to keep the overall vendor mix interesting.
- Also, if someone stopped attending because their product just failed badly but we thought it was a very good product, we will still choose a different type of product to replace them – because not every product does well in every situation. One of our roles is to notice those trends, and try to adjust the mix to fit the market audience.
So let’s assume that we now have a bit of capacity, and found a few new prospects that seem like good fits, and they are sitting on our waiting list. What happens next?
- We send an invitation to them, informing them that we would like to move forward and have them join the Market. An email is sent with a payment link to collect our vendor processing fee.
- At this point, we close out the application until the processing fee is paid. We generally give people a week or two to respond, and over 50% of invited wait list applicants fail to pay the fee and move forward. So we go back to the preview step, find another suitable candidate and try again.
- The above loop alone can easily add a month to the timeline – a lot of people just want to see if they can get in, but abandon the process in the end.
- For those that do pay the fee promptly, we collect the required business permits, insurances and related legal items that is associated with their product category. If they have everything together, it moves quickly – if they are surprised by a requirement (health permits and TNDA requirements are complex, and often throw new folks for a loop) this can take several weeks, even months. Sometimes they make it through, other times they drop out.
- But assuming the applicant moves quickly, all of that can be done on our end within a week - and we get them setup with our registration system so that they can begin to attend markets
Total time required to go from start to finish? Completely unknown, it depends on so many factors. I mentioned our smallest market in the example above, but the problem tree is exactly the same for our largest markets – it’s just that the numbers are larger. There is always a percentage of people who drop out from year to year, we just never know who or when (life happens). At the start of the season (now), we have much less predictability than we will in 30-60 days.
And there are other factors which play a role: sometimes things just break. I’m going to have someone reach out to you today, but hopefully this helps others understand the complexities and overall process.