Help BMF Keep the Dream Alive!

Hey, friends, family, and supporters of the culture! We are the founders of Black Market Flea (BMF), a platform and monthly marketplace for culture and commerce in Los Angeles. Since 2021, we’ve dedicated ourselves to creating a safe and inclusive space for Black creatives, makers, and entrepreneurs to thrive and connect with the community. Our mission is to support and uplift small, Black-owned businesses, and entrepreneurs. We serve as a platform to build equity, and provide a space where the culture can shine!

Our Journey

Black Market Flea was first imagined as a small space for a few Black-owned businesses to come together and showcase their creations in a place that felt for us, by us.

With extremely limited financial resources, at our very first Flea we held space for 27 vendors, and to our surprise, over 600 enthusiastic attendees! Today, we are proud to say our event has blossomed exponentially, with each event now hosting 150 to 200 vendors and 2,500-4,000 attendees monthly leading up to 2025!

We’ve seen firsthand how our marketplace has become an essential part of the Black community and community as a whole in Los Angeles. We’ve watched as Black Market Flea, our happy place, has become a catalyst and inspiration for others in our community to pave their own way in commerce spaces. From the vibrant and uniquely curated businesses, to our supportive attendees, BMF is a space where creativity, culture, and entrepreneurship collide.

However, as you may imagine, the road hasn’t been easy.

Why We Need Your Help

For four years, as an almost entirely self-funded operation, we have put everything into making BMF the incredible experience it is today. Every day, we put our minds together to think on how we can continue to improve this space we know our community deserves. Now, as the economy shifts and sacred spaces for communities of color under extreme threat, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to sustain this beautiful world out of our own pockets.

Here are some key reasons we need your help!:

Supporting Our Vendors – Many of our vendors are small, Black-owned businesses that rely on BMF to connect with their customers. We want to continue providing them with a platform to grow, and with your help, we can invest in better vendor support, marketing, and event infrastructure.

Maintaining Accessible Pricing – We need to keep our ticket prices as accessible as possible! It’s extremely important to us that our core community still has access to the space! We love that BMF feels like home to so many and never want that to change.

Programming – From performances to panels, we want to continue programming special moments and offering 1-of-1 experiences to our incredible community – and trust, we have ideas! We deserve to experience and engage in moments we love with the whole family at BMF.

We want to keep curating and producing high level performances! As you can imagine, booking incredible performances ain’t easy or cheap. From booking and equipment to travel, and lodging fees, costs pile up quickly. We love that we are able to bring our favorite performers out to rock on BMF stage at such an accessible ticket price! This of course also ensures that our vendors have the best possible attendance to showcase their gifts and sell products.

Production Costs – From venue leasing, equipment, logistics, operation costs and more, there are MANY moving parts behind the scenes to make BMF run smoothly. Funds will help us maintain accessible ticket prices, provide top-tier experiences, and ensure that our events remains of high-quality and sustainable.

Grow the Team - Of course making this all happen takes everything we’ve got! With an extremely small team of passionate individuals, we’ve been working tirelessly to keep BMF alive. Your contributions will help us grow our team to improve event execution and support the overall experience. We know that with more collective minds we can build BMF better than we’ve ever imagined.

The Future Vision for Black Market Flea

We have big dreams for The Flea! Our goal is to continue expanding our marketplace and support even more Black-owned businesses.

Expanding BMF to more cities - We want to build our family outside of LA! Every BMF we see folks come from outside of LA who tell us just how much they’d like to experience this in their city. We want to be sure to do this the RIGHT way!

A Black Market Flea Full Festival Experience?! - Yes! We’ve always dreamed of hosting a full-scale festival where attendees can enjoy music, food, and culture while supporting Black creators and celebrate the diaspora in all its beauty. But we need your help to make this happen! Your contributions will help us take the first steps toward making this vision a reality.

Our Promise to You

With your help, we will continue to pour into the heartfelt, community-focused, and enjoyable experience you’ve come to know and love! Every dollar you contribute will go directly towards building a stronger, more vibrant space for Black creators and entrepreneurs to thrive, while remaining financially accessible.

We’re grateful for the community we’ve built thus far, and excited to see how it continues to grow. Whether you’ve attended one of our events, supported a vendor, or shared our mission, you are family and a part of this journey with us.

Together, we can make Black Market Flea an even bigger force for good in Los Angeles and beyond. Thank you for your continued love and support. We couldn’t and wouldn’t do this without you!

With deep gratitude,

Mayah & Kene

Co-founders of Black Market Flea