>> [MUSIC] Our son lives in New York City,
and he is in
the high-end Italian clothing business there.
So we used to go visit him occasionally.
And one day, seven years ago,
or maybe eight years ago,
he said, "I want to show you something.
We're going to go to the green market. He said, "Ok".
So we go down to Union Square,
and it's really a neat area.
But when we went down to the square itself,
there was all these farmers
and vendors from all over the area,
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York.
There they allow vendors from
all the surrounding states to come in and sell product,
and it was absolutely teaming with business.
There was people everywhere,
and this was in the middle of the day.
And I read a little bit
about the man that decided to do this.
It was a blighted area at one point,
and he came up with the idea of the farmer's market,
and then all of the really good restaurants
in that whole area started to develop.
They buy product from the farmer's market,
they bring it to the restaurants,
and sell it so it's a very high-traffic area,
and I looked at my wife and she looked at me and she
said if they can do that here,
we can do it in Marietta.
So we came back and it took
us a year or so to get it together
because finding the vendors is
one thing, finding the customers.
To get the customers, you got to have the vendors.
So it took us a while.
We started out seven years ago in
the church parking lot right by the Baptist Church.
We originally wanted to set it up on North Park,
and it wasn't convenient at the time.
And we stayed there again for five years.
We started out with about 8-10 vendors,
a few customers and from there,
it continued to grow.
We would go from the active 12 vendors to
20 vendors and so forth till we got the fifth year,
we had about 36 vendors and we were out of
space in that particular location.
So I petitioned the city
to let us move to North Park Square,
got approval from all the merchants on North Park,
which was part of the deal,
and we exploded last year to where we had
around 50 vendors every Saturday and 1,000 customers.
[MUSIC]