We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Ryan Monson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Ryan , appreciate you joining us today. To kick things off, we’d love to hear about things you or your brand do that diverge from the industry standard

The industry standard for most markets has always been to pay a flat booth fee up-front that can range from the affordable $25 for an event all the way up to several hundred dollars for a weekend. We feel that this setup ends up discouraging “up-and-coming” businesses from attending markets and getting experience. Classic Buffalo charges vendors 10% of sales. This way, if they don’t do as well, they can focus on enjoying the event and not on the stress of trying to cover their booth cost.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Classic Buffalo initially started as a mental health streetwear brand centered around the idea of storytelling. I thought that anyone who was going through what he was needed to know that they were valuable. That no matter who they were or what they had been through, they were enough. No matter what their “story” was up to this point, it was a valuable one and worth sharing with people.

As to why it’s called “Classic Buffalo”, it’s because each word in the name had an important meaning to what I wanted customers to experience. The word “Classic” means “high-valued” and “an important story.”

When it comes to “Buffalo” it is an animal that is known for its strength within community, another key component of the brand. People deserve to be in a loving and supportive community of people and our problems in life can be much more solvable within a tight-knit community.

I think many people think that it makes them look weak for getting help for mental health or any kind of struggle in life but asking for help is one of the strongest things you can do!

The best way to explain what Classic Buffalo is today is that it’s a “herd” of small businesses. We have a market three times a month in downtown Indianapolis. What makes us different is that we take 10% of a vendor’s sales instead of a flat vendor fee. Additionally, the 10% we do take from vendors is then funneled to a local cause each month.

In the first few months that we ran markets in 2022, we generated $25,000 for small businesses and donated $2,500 to a local mental health non-profit (Irvington Counseling Collective).

Do you sell on your site, or do you use a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc?

We decided to try out Shopify for our regular vendors so that not only do they have the foot traffic three times a month but they can also have an affordable place to sell their goods online without having to pay $300+ for a domain, paying someone to setup the website etc.

Once again, we only charge them 10% when something sells just like ebay does.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Before I started doing markets with Classic Buffalo, I had my own vintage clothing re-selling company “Vintage Indy.” It was through that company that I can afford to invest in other businesses. The best advice for getting capital for something you want to do yourself is to re-sell things that have value around you through Facebook marketplace or even eBay.

Contact Info:

• Website: classicbuffalo.org
• Instagram: classicbuffalo
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@classicbuffaloindy/videos