Brooklyn Flea co-founders Jonathan Butler and Eric Demby at their legendary flea market'>Jonathan Butler and Eric Demby knew they were on to something when they opened the Brooklyn Flea back in 2008 and 20,000 people showed up. This month they introduce a new all-food market, called Smorgasburg.
Alex Raij, the chef and co-owner of New York City tapas restaurants El Quinto Pino and Txikito, ventured across the East River on a recent windy spring morning. Armed with a jug of liquefied gazpacho, she aimed to win over the palettes of Jonathan Butler and Eric Demby, the founders of the Brooklyn Flea. They spent a good deal of April interviewing potential vendors for a new all-food Saturday market—dubbed Smorgasburg—that they opened this month along Brooklyn's Williamsburg waterfront. Raij, a creative and renowned chef who's been in the restaurant industry for more than a decade, had never created a packaged food—but hopes her bottled gazpacho, branded La Buena, can make it at the market and, someday, at the grocery store.
"We want to make a product that lives beyond the restaurant, and for that the flea is so perfect," she told Butler and Demby, pouring them cups of cool soup, sprinkled with crab meat, olive oil, and croutons. "It's so hard to get seed money for a food product, but at the market we can scale it up in a small way and grow the business step-by-step."
They agreed it was a good fit, and Raij became one of hundreds of vendors that have, over the past four years, become affiliated with the Brooklyn Flea, and who use the weekend markets as venues through which to gain exposure, sales, and a community of loyal supporters.
Butler and Demby are entrepreneurs themselves. Butler, a lifelong New Yorker, had a somewhat schizophrenic career in business, dabbling in real estate, editing stories at a magazine, earning an MBA, buying an ownership stake of a design store, and working at a large Wall Street brokerage firm. While in finance, he anonymously began a popular blog about Brooklyn real estate. That was until 2007, when he quit commuting from Brooklyn into Manhattan, quit the firm, and exposed himself as the writer behind Brownstoner.com. The same year, as he completed renovations on his own Brooklyn brownstone, Butler became enamored with architectural salvage materials. He put up an announcement on Brownstoner.com that he was founding a weekend summer flea market near downtown Brooklyn.
"I think within the first 48 hours of that blog post going up we had 80 or 90 vendors apply," Butler said. "I just thought, 'Jesus. We're kind of on to something.'" He was joined by Demby, a friendly acquaintance who had spent recent years as a speechwriter for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. The pair opened the first Brooklyn Flea on April 6, 2008. An estimated 20,000 people showed up to search for treasures hawked by antique dealers, local artisans, and chefs. The Brooklyn Flea has since grown into a weekend institution for the borough's hipster foodies, vintage-clothing lovers, and design mavens. The New York Times dubbed it "one of the great urban experiences in New York." Today, Butler and Demby work with two additional staffers, publishing Brownstoner, managing a rotating cast of 500 independent vendors, facilitating four locations of the weekend market, and catering Central Park's SummerStage concerts. And now, add Smorgasburg.
Like the Brooklyn Flea, it is poised to not only be a bustling marketplace, but also a business incubator of sorts—with individual artisans and sellers growing their small businesses at a vibrant, hip market, often attended by scouts from established retailers, such as Dean & Deluca or Ralph Lauren. "It's low-cost retail with good foot traffic, so it's ideal for them," Demby says. "That's one of the most satisfying—and unexpected—aspects of what we've done."
It's also satisfying, Demby says, that the flea is bucking most of the retail trends of the day: Online shopping, group buying, daily deal purchasing. "You go to the flea and people are literally bartering face-to-face, and going stall-to-stall the way people did 100 years ago," he says. "There's a timeless quality to what we do."
"But meanwhile people are checking in there on Foursquare," Butler interjects. And, sure enough, the duo spends most of their weekdays connected online, with two other employees working out of a shared office in Brooklyn's DUMBO neighborhood. And the Brownstoner blog is still the cornerstone of the Brooklyn Flea brand.
"While that wasn't my initial 'grand scheme,' there is clearly a model where both publishing and events fit in a quite complimentary way," Butler says. "Now, business-wise, the flea has become a bigger business than the blog that gave birth to it."
Ask Butler and Demby whether they've used a replicable formula for a bustling artisan market—say, a Cleveland Flea—they sigh. Curation, carefully selecting vendors for each market, has been a focus from the start. Today, they attribute the unique and diverse mix of crafters, artisans, vintage resalers, and chefs, to the growing global reputation of the Brooklyn Flea.
"Even for us, if we think about doing a market in another city, you don't ever know if you can re-bottle the magic," Butler says. "You don't quite know how you did it in the first place. A nice day at the flea feels like exactly where you want to be at that moment and there's this sense of community—it's really hard to put your finger on or tell someone how to recreate it."
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