New Local pop-up market coming to Uptown Waterloo in April

A new shopping experience is coming to Uptown Waterloo later this spring.

The Local e-commerce pop-up market will open inside the Shops at Waterloo Town Square in early April and will be open every Saturday through October.

The space will feature people who normally only sell online, according to Krysta Traianovski, marketing and partnerships coordinator for The Local.

“We wanted to take advantage of the fact that there is they can retail space inside of the Shops at Uptown and just to kind of bridge that gap between people who are online and who’s actually out there in the community,” she explained

Traianovski says they have issued a call for vendors but it is expected that the market will feature a wide variety of different products that can often be seen at markets, as well as some that are a little different.

“There are some people who make bath products by hand, some paper and gift, some apparel for women, men, kids,” she offered.

Traianovski also said there will be “natural products like this one group who are actually a kid-owned business, who make products from bees that they raise at home.”

The pop-up shop is being operated with the support of the mall owners as well as Shopify, which is home to many smaller online retailers.

“They have a program of monthly educational events throughout a bunch of cities in Canada and across the world,” Traianovski noted.

She said that Shopify had opened a couple of similar pop-up shops in the area last fall and it was such a positive experience that local landlords asked for further opportunities.

Traianovski said that Shopify “just basically handed the details off to us of what the property management kind of required for that.”

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People don’t have to operate the businesses on Shopfy to participate in the market.

“It can be anybody on any platform,” she said. “That’s what we’re aiming for, because we understand there’s other people who are on Etsy or just selling through Facebook groups and other kinds of ways online.

“So what we’re trying to tap into the rest of them. But so far, most of the people who have expressed their interest have been through Shopify simply since they were more connected with them.”

The space inside the Shops at Waterloo Town Square is about 2,600 square feet and will house around a dozen vendors every Saturday.