A Liverpool social entrepreneur will this month pilot a unique night market, which will help support some of the city’s home grown businesses and local producers, at this year’s Light Night spectacular.
Nina Dales, who is currently enrolled on this year’s Spark Up business accelerator programme, will be unleashing her big top Night Market tent, at the event on Friday 15th May at Blackburne House, providing stalls for around 20 city region businesses.
These include food and drink businesses, such as the Liverpool Cheese Company and Joe Black Coffee, as well as arts and crafts traders such as The Beady Gecko and textile artist Sandra Hepworth.
It will also feature stalls, for some of the businesses on the Spark Up programme, including Russell and Brown’s Vintage Hair, who will provide a pop-up vintage salon for the evening, Triketastic promoting its eye-catching yellow trike tours and Just Juices, who will be selling its range of 100% natural super juices.
James Shaw from Klick Creative will also provide entertainment and AV support for the evening.
Nina, 41 from Aigburth in Liverpool first had the idea for the social enterprise business in 2014, with the aim of creating a new and affordable route to market for local businesses of all types including producers, artists and musicians.
After working in the third sector for ten years, she decided to develop The Night Market and secured start- up funding from the Lloyds Bank School for Social Entrepreneurs (SSE), as well as support from the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce’s business accelerator programme Spark Up – she is now ready to pilot the Night Market.
Nina said:
“The Light Night Market this week will be the perfect opportunity to pilot the business concept, as well as offer a great chance for some of the city’s fantastic local businesses to connect with potential customers and suppliers.
“Markets are traditionally a vibrant hub for sellers of all kinds of produce, materials, and creative ideas and are strongly associated with local, home grown materials, ingredients and talents. It’s this atmosphere and spirit of support for the local economy that I want to recreate with my Night Market concept.
“For me The Night Market will be all about creating a better economy locally and encouraging growth and support for the many new and small businesses in the city. In the long run it will hopefully encourage investment and create more job opportunities for local people.’’
“The pilot will help me too and I hope to fully launch my Night Market concept later in the year on a much bigger scale, offering routes to market for even more local businesses.”
Jay Roscoe, Area Manager at Joe Black Coffee, said:
“We at Joe Black Coffee are very proud to be taking part in this pilot event to showcase Liverpool’s talented local businesses at the Light Night Market event.
“At Joe Black we roast, blend and grind coffee right here on your doorstep in Liverpool using traditional flame roasters of which we have been experts in doing for over 50 years. We are truly a local company run by a dedicated team who believe strongly in supporting the economy of the local Merseyside community”
Spark Up is a 20-week programme set up by the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce to encourage and inspire entrepreneurial thinking.
Look out for our interview with Nina as part of next week’s YBnews round up.
Light Night Market will take place on Friday 15th May at Blackburne House, Blackburne Place just off Hope Street from 4pm till 9pm and it’s free to attend. Follow us on twitter @LivNightMarket and Facebook/LivNightMarket.