ATL Holiday Market ’24 Review

ATL Holiday Market was my last show of the year, hosted by ATL Entertains at Piedmont Park. I am a little embarrassed to report it was my new record low for sales of 2024. How did this come to pass? Dear reader, I shall tell you…

I first heard of the ATL Holiday Market when I was at Little Five Points’ Halloween Parade. A man came up to me with fliers and said he’d thought my booth would be a good fit for their upcoming event, ATL Holiday Market. Well with schmoozing like that, I’d have to follow up, right? On the flier was a website link which included separate applications for artist and food vendors. The application included a non-refundable fee with the final booth price at 100 dollars. I justified this price to myself since the venue was Piedmont Park, which couldn’t be cheap to rent. I was also curious to test if my Atlanta Pride success could be attributed to Piedmont Park itself. Spoiler alert, it could not.

ATL Entertains has primarily done business as a concert organizer and is recently broadening to market events. ATL Holiday Market was the first of its kind, the day of I’d met a staff member who said their interest in markets came from the success of their concerts’ vendors. The same staff member told me they were already planning to host a similar market in Piedmont Park the upcoming spring.

Now that I’m in the future, reflecting on the Billie of October, maybe I didn’t research the December market enough. I applied to events without enough consideration if they’d be a good fit, with the hope that the holiday season would drive sales alone. Some of it was experimentation, but perhaps there was desperation, as my waitlist status for Anime Weekend Atlanta loomed above my head. Without the validation of national conventions, I was happy for local event that’d have me. Coming away from this fourth quarter, the most valuable lesson I’ve learned is to be mindful of my artistic niche. I need to be careful of larger local markets, which I’ll define here as markets with 100+ vendors, that don’t have a theme that matches my work. And sure, you’d think I would’ve learned that lesson with Holiday Shopping Spectacular, now my second worst 2025 show, but I’d already paid my booth fees to ATL Entertains.

As I’d already said ATL Holiday Market was not a good show for me so that my review may be negatively biased. However, I’d like to be fair and be upfront that there were factors beyond their control that resulted in a bad turnout. That is to say, the rain. Having done outdoor markets for a few years now, it’s perhaps been good luck that I haven’t had heavy rain after rolling the dice so many times.

ATL Holiday Market was miserably wet. It was windy the day before, but by Sunday the forecast was rain and boy did it deliver. Not even Piedmont Park can draw out its regular crowd in the face of cold winter rain, only the joggers and dog walkers without time to stop. I tried to keep my tent as dry, a fruitless task with only one tent wall. The shirts I hung along my back wall got soaked, I didn’t account for how my wall and tent top weren’t air tight. I got up regularly to poke the top of my tent to let out water that pooled. Eventually, around midday other vendors wandered about and we chatted about low sales. I was fortunate to have four sales, I’d heard some had no sales at all with hardly anyone making above ten. Perhaps the few vendors who stood to make a fair profit were those selling hot drinks or food, but the foot traffic was so low I couldn’t say for sure. If the windiness of Winter Wanderland shook my confidence in outdoor winter events, the rain of ATL Holiday Market sank it.

That said, I do still have a couple of non-weather related criticisms of ATL Holiday Market. After I applied and got accepted, I followed ATL Entertains social media to get updates. I noticed they kept putting out the call for vendors pretty much days until the event, claiming to have open spots. I thought it was odd to not have capped their vendors at some point, especially since it was a first time event. And usually when you have an application fee it’s to limit the applications for a manageable level. The end result felt like there were so many of us, and even if the weather was fair I’d have to wonder if there was enough marketing. I did end up recognizing a few other vendors from L5P Halloween Parade as well, so I wonder how most of us were found.

My second criticism was the insistence on setting up tents for a one-day show the day before. Non-food vendors were expected to load-in and set up their outdoor tent, with hired security watching them overnight. Now, because I was at Winter Wanderland I wasn’t able to make it to my scheduled load-in time which would’ve been around Saturday evening. I wrote in and they told me I could come in Sunday morning instead, which was originally meant for food vendors to load-in. The way I was answered, it made me feel like perhaps I was being a bit of a bother, but that morning!!! There were plenty of other non-food vendors also loading in Sunday, haha. Now, perhaps it could be my own inexperience to think load-in the previous day is strange, Atlanta Pride does also allow the option for load-in the night before with hired security, however, Atlanta Pride is a weekend event. Atlanta Pride also provides vendors with heavy duty tents through a third party contractor. I learned, that morning, perhaps why Atlanta Pride does it this way.

Remember those high winds I mentioned for Winter Wanderland? Well, as I was loading in Sunday morning, I came across quite a few vendor tents that had escaped through the night. Tents that had galloped from their posts a few hundred yards, and some of their legs did have the remnants of weights. I guess that’s why some of the older established Piedmont Park shows costs so much for those tent spots, it’s for the giant concrete blocks and insurance coverage. Again, is it really on ATL Entertains that windspeeds were high and maybe vendors didn’t have enough weights to hold down their unmanned tents? I don’t know, I just know most of the other one-day events I’ve seen or applied to have us set-up and tear-down our own tents for just the day.

So those were a couple things that stood out to me. I may not have had a good time, but I will say I think it worked out better that I was at ATL Holiday Market than at AWA that same weekend. I heard from most of my friends who did vend at AWA it wasn’t a good show this year, and to be honest, I think I was able to learn out from a rained out show. Like importantly, even if a show went as bad as it could weather wise it wasn’t the end of the world. With Hot Hands and layers, I was able to keep warm enough to be safe. When I got home, I could dry off most of my wet messy supplies.

I don’t really even think it’s fair to give ATL Holiday Market a proper rating scale. It was just so bad.

One response to “ATL Holiday Market ’24 Review”

  1. Kiri Avatar

    Oof, rough weather is extra rough when a good chunk of your goods is paper products. I’ve done a few wet shows and even with 3 tent walls, nothing is really made to be air tight and just the humidity in the air will start warping and curling prints. I think my rule now is just no outdoor events between September and like, June. Seattle doesn’t have a long dry season.

    I think I tend to be wary of first-year events, too, unless I know the organisers well. There are more and more new markets every year, but inexperience in organising shows really fast.

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