BB Spotlight - Kirsta Franke

BB Spotlights feature Edmonton individuals that intrigue, inspire, and interest us and will be published once a month.

Kirsta Franke is an inspiring person.  And the more we talked to her, the nicer, smarter, and more ambitious she got.  She is the Market Director and Proprietor of the 124 Grand Market, a project she started all by herself back in 2012.  Now in it’s 3rd year, the market is a huge success and interviewing the mastermind behind it (and many other entrepreneurial feats), we know why.

The 124 Grand Market is a bustling block on 124th Street and 108th Avenue and is full of food trucks, delicious produce, unique original and vintage clothing, gorgeous flowers and plants, live music and theatre, and interactive art installations. What may seem at first glance like your normal farmer’s market, what goes into the process of choosing vendors, and ensuring the market experience is an optimum one, makes 124 Grand Market stand out from the rest.  

124 Grand Market is open every Thursday evening from 4pm until 8pm and will run until October 9th.  Please visit www.124grandmarket.com for more information and to learn more about all the events Kirsta is behind as well.

Here is our interview with Market Director and Proprietor, Kirsta Franke.

So the 124 Grand Market is currently in it’s third year!  Did you start this market?

All by myself in 2012.  I proposed the idea to the 124th Street Business Association and they thought it would be a great opportunity to bring people to the street.  They said go ahead with it and we had absolutely no money and not a lot of time to do it by the time summer came around.  February, 2012 was when the idea was put forward and we got it going May 22, 2012.

Wow, that’s so fast.

We started with 18 full time and part time vendors, and now we’re up to 62.

What made you want to start it?

A combination of a lot of things I think.  I worked on 124th street for a local restaurant for a long time and they did a lot of farm to fork stuff and it was kind of one of the first in the city to start really taking on that movement.  I got to meet a lot of producers, farmers, and wine makers.  It got me really involved in the food scene and really hungry to learn more about it.  From there, I decided that I wanted to do something with my communications background, and I thought maybe there’s a different way I can branch out.  I’m passionate about food and 124th Street and the fact that this area has no local grocery stores and had no farmer’s market.  Within 12 blocks of this street, it’s a food desert, essentially, down the main artery… except on Thursdays!

So the farm to fork and fresh food idea is really strong with you?

Yeah, I think I was exposed to it before it became a really big thing in Edmonton.  It was pretty early.  It was an organic introduction to it and I think that I just naturally took to it and wanted to see the producers that were doing great things within Edmonton and the surrounding area do well on a different platform.  Also, on the art side of things, I had a lot of people that were doing really great creative things whether it was with jewelry or art or film or photography and I wanted to form a platform for them that wasn’t just your regular farmer’s market.  Because, a lot of them have their own special niches but I wanted to form something with a completely different identity. 

What sets this one apart from other markets?

I think that it has a much younger vibe.  There’s a lot of people that are incredibly passionate about what they do, not saying that other farmer’s markets are not at that point, but I think that within the one block radius of this market and within the 45 vendors you can fit per week in here, we offer quality over quantity and it’s curated really well.  So some of the markets that you’ll see will have 6 or 7 of the same kind of jewelry vendor and we didn’t want to create that repetition.  We wanted to create more of a space where you could look to one spot and think ‘that’s exactly what I want to buy’ and not have to move further to find it.  What’s great about this, too, is that maybe we’ll have one jewelry vendor here one week and she won’t come back for maybe 3 or 4 weeks and we’ll keep cycling different people through that we really believe their products are great and will sell well. 

Is that up to you guys, who’s in it?

We do everything.  Our first year, it was my best friend, Shannon, and I who actually were the force behind it and currently Amy is my Assistant Market Director.  We’re the people that you email, that you call.  We’re the face of the organization.  We are the people who move the barricades to set this up, who move cars onto the street, and we take out the garbage at the end of the night.  We make sure that the vendors are happy, and that the customers are happy.  First ones on the street, last ones to leave.

So you’re completely involved in every aspect...

Which is great because it gives us full control to create, I brought this vision to life.  You have ideas about what things are going to be when you start them out, but it was like - okay I actually see what I saw in my brain coming to fruition and to be able to continue to do things you love everyday is pretty cool.

So your education background is communications?

I took journalism at Grant MacEwan in 2010.  It was a 2 year diploma program.  It was pretty great for what it was worth but I think I was kind of disillusioned about what I could do within the field of journalism.  So I thought, ‘what am I going to do that is going to exercise the skills that I have'  and this was one of them.

What happens in the winter time for you?

I think there’s one month in the whole year that I’m not working on market stuff, that I actually turn my brain off and don’t look at emails from it and that’s pretty much December or January, depending.  We put out the applications in February and we just start moving forward from there and then we end in October.  I also run a festival called ‘All is Bright on 124 Street’.  It’s first year was last year in November and so that was pretty cool. 

Tell us about All is Bright.

All is Bright is a brand new winter festival that we’ve done on 124 Street.  We shut down four blocks on 124th Street and we put in a winter marketplace with vendors from the 124 Grand Market.  There were food trucks, there was a beer garden, we brought in performers like Shout Out and Wool on Wolves, local musicians like Awesome Hots, Rapid Fire Theatre was there doing improv, there was a children’s area - all outside.  It was all about celebrating edmonton in the winter time because we are a festival city and things kind of shut down after the summer time.  It’s like why not keep it going, right?  I think there’s a lot of momentum, especially behind winter events right now.  We’re technically the first starting out the winter event season because then Ice on Whyte and the Deep Freeze come afterwards. We saw about 10,000 people for the first year and that’s good for us.  This year we’re hoping to make it even bigger and better.  Allisbright124.ca.

Getting back to the market, how has it grown over the past few years?

Vendor numbers, and we’ve doubled the amount of patrons we see on a regular weekly basis which is pretty great.  So in the first year, we saw an average of 700 and our second year it was about 1100-1200 so we’ve more than doubled that which is great.  Also, just the exposure.  The community is starting to recognize that we’re here all the time.  They’re coming down and seeing it which is really good.  

We’re doing some incredibly great community outreach events such as a fundraiser with Taste Alberta which is coming up on July 13th and it’s gonna actually be more like a 'meet your farmer dinner', where you do a culinary tour of four different farms.  We give you a map, you go to these farms for the day, and take a look at all these different spots about a half hour outside of Edmonton.  It goes from about 9am to 4pm and the tour will end with a late lunch prepared by notable Chef’s like Mike Scorgie from WOODWORK and other chefs that have been involved in the market in many ways.  Everybody can come together and celebrate all the food that they were just exploring.  That’s our first bigger event that we’ve done, but just kind of reaching out and doing more events like that is good.  Information can be found on our website.

What would you hope for the market in the future?

A lot of people ask me if I’m going to grow it in size, ask maybe if it will take up another couple blocks.  A lot of people come here and say ‘I didn’t realize it was this small’ which because there’s only 2 of us running it, would be a bit hard…

I can’t believe there’s only 2 of you running it.

Well we have great volunteers too, and boyfriends, who are incredibly supportive of what we’re doing so it’s awesome.  It’s difficult to say what I see in the future because I think I’m always focusing on how to make now better for the market and I think that that’s just organically grown in it’s vision.  It makes it better for the future.  But I am always planning ahead.  It’d be nice to have money to throw at the performers, bring a performance series in, because we don’t have any money to pay the buskers or theatre acts that come.  I’d love to make that a little bit stronger and then just continue to bring in quality vendors and work with the community groups.  

Any other projects you’re pursuing?

Another really great project I’m working on is starting a community garden on 124th Street.  It’s going to actually be on the same street as the market, just about 2 blocks down.  There’s a beautiful grassy patch where there’s a dog run and a bike path so that should be good to go by next summer.  What I’m hoping is it will be a great community project for a lot of people who are involved with the market and involved with the community to come on board and exercise a little muscle in their gardening skills.  We want it to be inclusive agriculture, more edible landscaping, not ‘here’s your plot’ but more like everyone works together and everyone gets a share of the market garden.  We’re thinking of calling it Grand Gardens which might be kind of fun.  From that, we’re hoping to take the proceeds from anything we sell and put them towards lunch programs within the schools so they can provide fresh food for their kids.  We just want to do fun stuff like that.  I see us doing more community outreach.  I don’t see us growing the market, I like where we’re at.  I see us growing in different ways within the community.  

I’m also on the Edmonton Food Council, started by the City of Edmonton.  We’re working on great initiatives like building more community gardens so every community has a garden space and has access to grow they’re own food.  We’re just trying to make the city more food friendly in terms of urban agriculture.

I also work at the 124 Street Business Association now.  They saw what I did in the first year with the market and they wanted to bring me in house and to do what I did with the market for the street.  I do community relations work and work with over 400 members within the community on 124th street doing marketing, smaller events, and a lot of social media.  It’s good to be a face of the 124 community.

Did you grow up here?

Born and raised in Edmonton and I love this city.  One thing that encouraged me to start this market is that when I was fresh out of high school, everybody would say ‘yeah, I’m moving, you know, the music scene sucks here, there’s no culture, Edmonton’s an oil city full of rednecks’ and I thought, ‘No, there’s so many great people here and they’re full of talent, and great, amazing food that’s been grown within a local radius. Why not support that and why not make this the city you actually want to live and support.’ 

You have to be creators of your destiny, I guess, you can’t just sit around and hum and haw, and not do anything about it.  

I love the fact that there’s amazing people doing amazing things, every corner you turn, there seems to be another great idea.  Especially with the City of Edmonton and Make Something Edmonton, there are really great initiatives that they’re putting forward for the city to be inspired to do more awesome things.