Renegade Craft Fair

How are you? We hope you’re staying safe and strong. We’re thinking of you, and thinking of all the ways we can help our community persevere. We’ve spent the last several weeks regrouping and recalibrating our focus to the digital realm, with our mission guiding our vision. Which brings us to our *very* exciting announcement…

We’re hosting a Virtual Fair

It’s going to be every Friday and Saturday, on the World Wide Web via our website. And it’s going to be the real deal! With human-ish interaction (the together apart kind) that will connect our entire community of artists and creatives with our lovely supporters from all over. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When life gives you a pandemic, you make a giant leap. We’re jumping in with both feet and head first, because that’s how we do. We’re giving it our all, and forging ahead with fresh eyes on the horizon.

How We Got Here

When the first wave of news about coronavirus crashed over our heads, and events started canceling, we experienced a whole flurry of emotions: from denial to concern, fear to anger, gratefulness to hope. Above all, we just didn’t want to believe it. Our fairs have always felt so communal, especially in contrast to the larger events that were being cancelled early on. Our concern grew for our artists and their livelihoods, and for all the small businesses we support, including our own.

Questions started to arise – where do we go from here, and how are we going to weather this? Our entire small business revolves around bringing large gatherings of people together to support artists, entrepreneurship, and build community.

After acceptance set in, our team came together to brainstorm what would come next. Where there’s a will there is a way. And while we can’t control the situation, we can control how we react to the situation. So that’s what we’ve decided to do here at Renegade: for the time being, we have pivoted our business to creating an online platform for our community to virtually come together (while 6’ apart).

We are innovating and using every cell in our hearts and minds to keep ourselves afloat and help keep others afloat in this temporarily unrecognizable world. And it’s strange – despite the dire circumstances, there’s also a feeling of excitement, of starting anew, of being on the cusp of something truly special.

We’re here for it, we’re here for you, we’re in this together.

We can’t wait for you to visit Renegade Craft Virtual Fair, kicking off on the World Wide Web via our website every Friday and Saturday in May. For two hours each day, you can expect a dynamic virtual experience where artists will be going live, showing their work and process (as we’ve been seeing and inspired by so much of lately). Look forward to studio and home tours, demonstrations, Q+A’s, fireside chats, tutorials, meditations, performances, how-to’s, and much much much more. Will you join us? We sure hope so, we love and miss you, and can’t wait to see your faces again hopefully soon.

They say that after acceptance comes meaning, and we truly feel that we have learned and will learn so much more from this experience. If there’s a silver lining to this, it’s that we now know for certain, in our heart of hearts, that connection is what makes us human. We can’t wait to see you again, at a real life Fair in the future. Until then, we’ll see you in the Portal.

With love & hope,

Susie & Your Friends at Renegade ❤︎