Birmingham AL — The Woodlawn Street Market filled the 55th Place block between 1st AVE N and 1st AVE S, and spilled over into the adjacent parking lot.

On Saturday, April 1, Birmingham and area residents interacted with a wide variety of vendors, offering anything from fresh produce to henna designs, and clothing to snoballs. A DJ kept the music going for the six-hour event.

Woodlawn Street Market began back in 2014, when a few dozen startups shared their products with shoppers at the first Woodlawn Street Market. Bekah Fox, Communicating Vessels Artist and Brian Gunn, REV Birmingham District Lead work extra hard to put together this quarterly event.

Now in its third year, the first Woodlawn Street Market of 2017 featured nearly 100 small businesses, the biggest market to date. More than thirty of them are new to the Woodlawn Street Market. The street marketplace gives small business owners some real world experience to test their products, meet new customers and gain valuable feedback.

Wani and David Shaw, owners of Magic City Sweet Ice, graduated from CO.STARTERS, a small business development program of Create Birmingham that REV is proud to partner on. There are several graduates of the REV CO.STARTERS program attending the market to test and perfect their concepts before settling into a brick and mortar location. REV’s goal is to build sustainable businesses that can fill vacant spaces in commercials districts, making them vibrant again.

Several vendors have moved into brick and mortar locations since they started participating in Woodlawn Street Market, including Magic City Ice and Domestique Coffee.

If you have a business concept you’d like to develop, start by connecting with REV’s Director of Business Growth, Deon Gordon at deon@revbirmingham.org. For information about the Woodlawn Street Market, email District Coordinator, Brian Gunn at bgunn@revbirmingham.org.