We asked our reporters, who play so well with others, to choose a favorite story from 2023 by a Retail Brew colleague.
Every fall, holiday markets pop up around New York City seemingly overnight—almost as if a certain sleigh-riding mythical creature had dropped them off when I wasn’t looking.
As a retail reporter, you’d think I’d have looked into them myself, but until this year I was happy to leave it as a little holiday mystery. After all, who needs an explanation when you’re sipping super-rich hot chocolate and window shopping for over-priced knick-knacks?
Then Retail Brew’s Erin Cabrey came along with a profile of Urbanspace, the company behind the biggest holiday markets in the city—and I’m glad she did. Now I know that those “red-and-green ‘jewel box’ kiosks,” as Cabrey writes, cost between $22,500 and $40,000.
I also learned that figuring out how the sausage gets made (or maybe apple cider donuts, in this case) doesn’t have to dispel the magic. As Urbanspace President Eldon Scott told Erin:
“Every year, they go up relatively quickly, and suddenly you look at this space that was a week before a plaza, and then suddenly, this little community of shops. It’s like this village got built in a week,” he said. “It’s just magical to see it transform that rapidly.”
Market watch: The piece also points toward the future of holiday markets: e-commerce. Apparently, vendors pushed the company to set up an online marketplace to counter falling sales in recent years. We’ll have to wait until the new year to see how well it worked.
Read the original story: Inside the making of NYC’s iconic holiday markets
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