For over six hours the Saturday before Father’s Day, 700 people crammed into the Root City summer market, featuring 45 vendors inside a long hallway of Atlanta’s The Stove Works.
Root City is pop-up market that’s been around since 2013, founded by Jen Soon who then sold it last December to Shannon Kroll.
Kroll, who lives in Atlanta’s Reynoldstown neighborhood, has seemingly done everything except running a pop-up market. She’s worked in Atlanta’s tech industry, in environmental sustainability and for 10 years was a substance abuse counselor for teenagers and young adults.
“What I’m trying to do with Root City is bring a fresh eye, and a high level of craftsmanship and artisanal goods,” Kroll said. “I like efficiency, and I can help small businesses get more efficient.”
Though identified with millennials, pop-up markets date back to at least 13th century Vienna. One of the early modern day pop-ups was 1997’s The Ritual Expo in Los Angeles, later branded as a one day “ultimate hipster mall.”
But Root City’s summer market seemed, in many ways, explicitly anti-mall. It was sweaty, compressed, temporary (all of Root City’s large markets are one day), teeming with original, and in some cases only-one-of-a-kind items.
Kroll’s current vendors include a hand soap maker, an artist who paints on paper and wood, a hand-made granola maker, photographers, jewelry makers, ceramicists, leather goods makers and artisans making a variety of wood products including small furniture.
Kroll believes the surge in pop-up markets can be traced in part to a basic human kinship for handmade items. But there’s also the fact that many talented artisans have no inclination, nor inspiration, to see their creations swallowed up by big box stores.
“For some of my makers this is strictly their livelihood, while others aren’t quite ready to quit their day job,” Kroll said. “But whatever business track they’re on I want to help them get there. That could be anything from getting their stuff to a wholesaler to getting their own place.”
Since taking over Root City, Kroll has cut back from having four large markets (like Saturday’s) to three annually, along with a series of smaller, more experimental markets.
For instance she has mini pop-ups scheduled for the July 29-30 Dirty South Yoga Fest, for Labor Day weekend’s AJC Decatur Book Festival (she’ll feature, among others, hand-made pens and notebooks), and October’s Atlanta World Kite Festival.
Her next full-scale pop up is December’s holiday market at a still undetermined site. Until then Kroll’s primary focus is presenting a number of workshops, or panel discussions led by experts on marketing, bookkeeping, pricing products and business development.
“I look at this job as being long term,” she said. “I see my makers as kind of like minor league baseball players. I’m hoping we can give them the tools to make the majors.”
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