‘This is something our Chamber of Commerce should probably get behind’, said Paul Davidson, owner of Main Street Market in Downtown Chipley, Florida, in response to the huge success of this year’s ‘Chipley Flea Market Day$’.
‘We had a better than average Friday and Saturday, with a lot of customers and a lot of faces we have never seen before’, continued Davidson, whose business is located at the intersection of Highway 90 and Highway 77 (Main Street) in this small rural town in Northwest Florida.
The subject of these comments was the Spring 2018 installment of ‘Chipley Flea Market Day$’, originally developed to spur visitation to Chipley, Florida and to hopefully increase retail sales for those downtown merchants, as seen in these photos from past events by Real Florida Media, a subsidiary of The Goulding Agency in Chipley, Florida.
The 2018 event proved effective at attracting new people to the area and more importantly, getting them into the local businesses and spending money.
One area that was high-traffic over the weekend was the former Ashley Furniture parking lot, located just a few blocks east of Highway 77, which became a tent city for all sorts of vendors, garage sales and other retail products.
Formerly also the location for the WestPoint Home Factory Outlet, the location is high-profile, visible for quite a distance in both directions and has become to defacto epicenter for the ‘Flea Market Day$’ weekends.
The event originally encouraged property owners and residents to clean up and showcase their business properties, as well as fl;ea markets and garage sales, and the event was scheduled to coincide with ‘Flea Across Florida’, with over 272 miles of bazaars, yard sales, garage sales and flea markets, stretching from Live Oak. Florida to Pensacola, Florida.
The event was immediately successful, but the original sponsoring organization, ‘the Merchants of Historic Downtown Chipley’, lost interest and energy, leaving the twice-yearly event to be promoted by local PR firm The Goulding Agency, who had originally developed marketing for the event.
‘We realized that as a downtown business ourselves, we needed to give back to the community, and, because our philosophy is that ‘high tide floats all boats’, the event was too good to abandon’, says Goulding Agency President Debbie Goulding, who has underwritten the costs associated with the advertising and marketing of the event for the past 6 years.
See more information, along with photos, video clips and interviews, on Facebook, at ‘Chipley Flea Market Days’.
