‘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 the ‘Chipley Flea Market Day$’ in 2018, and today the event is alive and well.
Originally developed to spur visitation to Chipley, Florida by the Merchants of Downtown Chipley, and to hopefully increase retail sales for those downtown merchants, the event piggybacks on Florida’s longest yard sale, Flea Across Florida, in a twice-yearly event, this Spring occurring on April 12-14, 2024.
The yard sale is literally on every street corner, with the ability for residents to set up displays of their unwanted trash or treasure from Friday at 6AM until Sunday at 5PM.
People come from all over the tri-state area to set up their gently used items or homemade arts & crafts along historic highway 90, which parallels the original east/west corridor through the Florida Panhandle, the Old Spanish Trail.
The event originally encouraged property owners and residents to clean up and showcase their business properties, as well as flea 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 underwrote the costs associated with the advertising and marketing of the event for the first several years.
