FRESH Markets

Fresh Markets started in 2012 with four tents in a park in Asbury Park. Today we run roughly 200 events a year and work with more than 10,000 local artists, makers, bakers, farmers, and food purveyors across New Jersey.

The idea hasn’t changed in all that time: bring people together, and make it easier for small businesses to show up and grow where they live. What began as a way to give local entrepreneurs a place to be seen has become a network of year-round farmers and makers markets, seasonal pop-ups, and community events, each one shaped to feel personal and rooted in the town it serves.

The work is more than transactions. We curate carefully, we give vendors consistent opportunities rather than one-off shots, and we try to build markets where vendors feel supported and customers feel welcome. Whether someone is testing an idea for the first time or growing a business they’ve spent years on, the job is to take friction out of the way and help them build momentum.

Fresh Markets is also where Convene came from. After more than a decade of running markets, and building our own internal tools to handle applications, bookings, and payments because nothing purpose-built existed, we turned that software into a product other organizers could use to run their own events and recruit vendors. Fresh is the operating business, and Convene is the technology that grew out of it.