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Date: 10/9/2019
SOUTHWICK – After closing its old location in Westfield last May, the Yellow Bear Marketplace opened its doors back up on Sept. 18 at its new home on College Highway in Southwick.
Yellow Bear first opened eight years ago according to owner Vicki Benford and has been family-run and owned ever since.
In addition to the odds and ends Benford finds from house cleanouts, Yellow Bear also works with local vendors. “You rent a space by the month, you come set up your stuff and leave it in the store. Right now we have 59 vendors, it’s kind of like a co-op,” Benford said.
“It’s a bunch of small businesses inside one small business working together,” said Brandi Reed, Benford’s daughter.
From comic books to toys and antiques, Yellow Bear offers a variety of different items from all of its vendors. Currently, the marketplace is also hosting a special holiday section that will be up through December. Benford said this section is full of local, hand-crafted items.
Along with the space inside the store, Benford said they also have sheds out behind the building that customers can also pick through.
“The sheds out back are a little messier but that’s fine because there’s pickers. They don’t want to walk into a cute little organized place, they want to dig,” Benford said.
“A lot of our customers like to think of it as a treasure hunt,” Reed added.
Before the move, Benford said they had to clear out everything and they started with sales in the hopes people would come in and clean out their stock but they ended up having to give some of it away.
“The last day we put up online that everything was free and hordes of people came in loading their trucks and it worked, we were able to get rid of everything,” she said.
The move from Westfield to Southwick took a little longer than expected.
“It was hectic, I really thought it was only gonna be for like a month or two and it didn’t turn out that way,” Benford said.
Benford added that she is happy with the new location for the Market in Southwick’s shopping area. “It’s been fun, it’s neat learning how to deal with a different area, you just have to adapt,” she said.
Later this month, Yellow Bear will celebrate its grand re-opening alongside the Southwick Farm Animal Parade on Oct. 20. She said the opening will take place before the parade so people can set up and stick around to watch.
“We’ll have a couple food trucks and popcorn and cupcakes. If people want to watch the parade they can sit outside and come in and shop if they’d like,” she added.
Benford said the marketplace offers sales throughout the year. She said in the past they have done sales to start the spring and summer as well as a store-wide sale for Small Business Saturday.
On top of everything, Benford said they also offer balloon bouquets and customers can choose from a catalogue of balloons or the store’s own stock of latex balloons.
Yellow Bear Market is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday throughout the year but is closed on holidays.