If you’re working tirelessly at creating the things you love to share or sell to others, Ghost Market co-founders Tess Pell and Anna Matisak have created a traveling space for aspiring vendors like you.
Forming Ghost Market
Pell is a jeweler by day, running In Good Company Jewelry out of her home studio. Pell participated as a vendor at various pop-ups for about six months before she considered running a full vendor market of her own. She said her experiences made her notice, “there’s a lot of stuff that’s just not fair for us.”
“At some places, the vendors are kind of used as the entertainment. People are coming to hang out, drink, shop, have a good time, talk to artists and look at what they’re making. But, nobody’s shopping and spending with the artist,” she said. “From the artist’s perspective, we’ve paid to be there, we’ve put time into making the product and we’re spending time at the table talking with people. Many of us are creatives who are pretty introverted — that’s a tax on our mental.”
Pell said it’s a red flag when the organizer of an event sees that sales were low, and still says, “But think about the exposure you got.”
“It does not feel fair,” she said. “I heard a lot of other people saying the same things — there’s really no safeguard, there’s no network behind this, there’s no accountability.”
One of the best experiences Pell had at a vendor market was in 2023 at her first pop-up at Rose Parlor in Cleveland. Pell said she loved the small local shop vibe, the community was kind and fun, and it made her “addicted to pop-ups.”
After missing the vendor call for holiday-themed markets, Pell started asking businesses if she could host a solo pop-up. That’s when the manager of BottleHouse Brewery in Lakewood asked her if she would be willing to organize a full market at their location, with no cost to the vendors — just an opportunity to promote the city’s local businesses.
Working alongside her friend Max Mosser, they organized two vendor markets at BottleHouse — little did they know, it was just the beginning.
“Max came to me and was like, ‘Let’s replicate this. I will help you.’ It was not something that one person can do,” Pell said. “Anna and I can barely keep [Ghost Market] functioning at the level it’s at now while doing our day jobs.”
Pell said it was Mosser who introduced her to Matisak. Pell and Matisak started talking about the vendor scene, what they wanted to see, and how they could do it to benefit vendors and the shoppers.
“We wanted to be a safe third space,” Pell said.
Mosser, who is also the owner of Preserve the World Vintage and The Better Sweater Co., said Pell ran an event he participated in that checked off all of the boxes of what he wanted to create in Cleveland. He said Pell and Matisak made the vision of Ghost Market come true.
“Ghost Market is special because it is run by vendors for vendors. It’s run by people who care about vendors and know what it takes to make sure an event is successful,” Mosser said. “We have all vended great events — and horrible ones — so we have experienced the highs and lows. We want to make sure a vendor isn’t going to risk their brand vending with us.”
Soon after, the team found Dahlia Coffee Co. in the Cudell neighborhood on the west side of Cleveland. This is where they hosted their first vendor market, successfully bringing together more than 20 vendors.
For the Love of Vendors
After their first market, Pell said requests to partner with the team started to pour in, which led to the creation of the Ghost Market brand. As a graphic designer, Pell created all of the Ghost Market art and merchandise designs by hand. Matisak, who owns her own strategic marketing company A.MAT Creative, said it’s the perfect partnership since her background includes communications and partner relations.
Matisak and Pell said Ghost Market will only collaborate with events, organizers or businesses they know will treat their vendors well.
“We are not going to work with people that we don’t share the same values with. If we don’t feel like it’s a good fit for us, and for what we’re trying to do and for our vendors, we are not going to do it,” Matisak said. “We have said no to people who have asked us before, especially if we didn’t trust that they would work with [the vendors] like we would.”
“Our vendors who can’t afford to enter the big shows, or the ones who don’t get in because they don’t have that presentation but their work is good — there’s a lot of bar for entry and we like to give those people a platform,” Pell said. “If we can’t send them into spaces to vend where we know they’ll be safe and treated well, we’re not going to do it.”
Matisak said Ghost Market is able to keep its vendor fees reasonable, with a portion of the proceeds going to Avanzamos Unidos (formerly known as the Young Latino Network), a local nonprofit working to unite the Latine community across Ohio.
From August 2025 to August 2026, Ghost Market has hosted 12 markets across Cleveland. Pell said in their first six months, they hosted more than 100 vendors. Today, Ghost Market has a list of more than 150 vendors they can call on when curating a market. Some of their repeat vendors include Indigo Florals in Lakewood, Funky Eclectic, and Crumbs of Celeste. The markets now typically range between 20 to 60 or more vendors each.
“The response from Cleveland has also been amazing,” Mosser said. “The amount of times that we hear from vendors and customers they’ve been waiting for an event like ours, or that they sold out, or how they’ve been looking for a like minded place to shop locally and support their favorite artist has been amazing and so rewarding to know that the risk we took in start Ghost Market has paid off. We actually are making an impact and helping community members.”
Social Proof from Vendors
Before Ghost Market, Ivianna Celeste, founder of Crumbs of Celeste, a bakery, only sold pre-orders through her website. Celeste sold out at her first Ghost Market event — which was also Ghost Market’s first event at Dahlia’s.
“It was an experience I’ll never forget and gave me so much confidence in growing Crumbs of Celeste beyond online orders,” Celeste said.
She said markets like Ghost Market don’t just support individual businesses — they strengthen Cleveland’s creative community and local economy.
“Every purchase supports someone’s dream, keeps money circulating within our neighborhoods, and encourages people to invest in the talented makers who call this city home,” she said.
Wilson Torres, the owner of Indigo Florals, said she feels lucky to have met Pell, Matisak and Mosser. She said they taught her what a good market should be.
“I’m not only talking about good sales. I’m talking about all of the work they put into their markets, plus the open communication that they have with all of their vendors,” Torres said.
Torres said markets have been the best way for her to meet clients.
“Every wedding, baby shower, or event I have done, It has been from someone I met organically through a market,” she said. “When you support local, not only are you supporting someone else’s dream, but you are making sure the money stays here instead of [going to] big corporations that might not care so much about the local community.”
Bringing All of Cleveland Together
Matisak said that as a lifelong Cleveland fan, she has seen how the community can come together and that “people are really hungry for these spaces.”
”That’s what we didn’t anticipate,” she said. “We started out just being like, ‘Yeah, let’s do this. It’ll be really fun, we’ll get to go to markets, we’ll build markets, and it’s somewhere that we want to be — not realizing that people really love a good market.”
She said it’s also exciting to see vendors from all over Cleveland come together, exposing visitors to the many different cultures running local businesses across the city.
“As white women, we have a platform just because of what we look like and who we are. We feel a responsibility to use that to benefit the people who don’t have that privilege,” Matisak said. “If that means we get to help uplift the BIPOC community or the queer community and the vendors from there, and we get to expose these other white people that come to our events to that, then that makes it worth it. At the end of the day, that’s something that I want my kids to understand. I want to raise good people, and I want them to understand what it’s like to have that privilege and how it can be used for good things.”
Matisak said Ghost Market is for the folks with side hustles, passion projects, collections, a love of vintage, or anyone with a creative side.
“There’s a lot of people that are doing this and that don’t have brick and mortar spaces. This gives them the opportunity to have a low vendor fee and to have us help with the marketing,” she said.
Recognizing that not every individual with a passion-filled side hustle is business savvy, Matisak said Ghost Market can be a space for those experiencing vendorship for the first time.
“We get to gather all these folks that don’t have their own brick and mortar space, but can jump on board with Ghost Market. We get to do vendor highlights. We have this audience that’s growing. We have this platform where we can give them this leg up,” she said. “What it ends up doing is tying back into Cleveland’s economic development, and it’s giving people confidence. If you can make the decision even just a little bit more to shop local versus not, it’s gonna make a difference.”
Upcoming Markets
Vendors interested in joining the Ghost Market vendor network can visit the website for vendor criteria and to complete the application form.
Ghost Market will return to Dahlia Coffee from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on September 13 for its one year anniversary, and again on October 4.
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