Help Local Maverick open a Store for VT products!

We are raising money to open our first Maverick Market brick & mortar shop!

YOUR SUPPORT HELPS WITH ADDITIONAL WORK NEEDED AT OUR SPACE, MARKETING DOLLARS TO SUPPORT OUR SMALL BUSINESSES, & WORKING CAPITAL FOR OUR SPACE

Local Maverick's 'Maverick Market' is a curated market for VT products. We support small Vermont businesses selling Food, Drink, & Craft products. Our new store in Burlington will support hundreds of local VT businesses

WATCH OUR FUNDRAISER VIDEO: CLICK HERE

DONATION PERKS!

$50+ Donation: Receives a $10 Local Maverick Gift Card

$100+ Donation: Receives a $20 Local Maverick Gift Card

$500+ Donation: Become part of the Maverick Member Club. Receives a VIP invite to our soft opening party, an invite to a yearly Local Maverick Members dinner, and get special access to events & discounts.

$1,000+ Donation: Become a VIP Maverick Member and receive all of the above, plus a yearly discount on products, custom Local Maverick Merch, and a special gift box of Local Products

WHAT WE ARE RAISING MONEY FOR:

To open our first Maverick Market brick & mortar shop!

This storefront is located right in the heart of downtown Burlington at 110 Main Street. Maverick Market is a curated marketplace that sells high-quality products from small, local Vermont businesses.

We are committed to working with and selling food, drink, & craft products from over 100 Vermont farms, chefs, markers, artists, and producers. We feature local cheeses from Stony Pond Farm, nut butters from The Nutty Vermonter, chocolate from Nu Chocolat, coffee from Brio & Kestrel, hand-made mugs, and so much more! This shop will be an extension of our online marketplace and popup event markets which will continue to make it easier to discover, shop, and support our incredible Vermont small business community. This location will be a permanent location for us to run our market out of which is very vital to helping our businesses grow!

Our Website | Our Instagram

In addition to shopping, this shop will be a hub for our community. We will feature special events where you can meet the people behind the products, have local chefs host demonstrations, and even host popups with local businesses such as Harmony's kitchen. We are also working with Wild Hart Distillery to host a tasting room! The space will feature a small "kitchen counter" area for demos/shopping and a small lounge area in addition to retail shelving & refrigeration.

We are very proud to be partnered with over 100 incredible people and businesses, with more than 50% of them being women-owned & operated. In our first 2 years of operation, we generated more than $100,000 in sales for our network of market vendors! With this store, we plan to triple this number in the first year.

Scaling a business is HARD. We want to use this shop as another tool to help our smallest community businesses share their story, get great products into people's hands, and grow!

All of the funds raised through this fundraiser will help support the development of the space, the equipment needed to build out our store, staffing, and the point-of-sale items needed to enhance the store/customer's experience. It will all be re-invested back into our community!

KEEP READING IF YOU'RE INTERESTED IN THE ORIGIN OF LOCAL MAVERICK

The Origin of Local Maverick:

Our Mission: Local Maverick is a sales & marketing platform for small, Vermont businesses. We are an outlet to help share the stories of incredible small businesses. Our mission is to empower local communities & economies by making it easier for people to discover, shop, and support local businesses & community programs. Within Local Maverick, we have our market, Maverick Market, as well as offer some marketing services to small businesses, Maverick Marketing.

The Start: In January 2020, founder Ryan Nakhleh started working on a business idea to make it easier to shop with local businesses. Ryan always wanted to be more engaged and supportive in his community but found it could often be challenging to find out what was going on. A quick Google search wasn't exactly going to get you the best local options. At the time he was working for a luxury company looking for ways to create a luxury ski experience, developing partnerships, and developing an e-commerce platform to seamlessly connect online & offline, making for a seamless customer experience. This project lead Ryan to start thinking about the possibility to develop this sort of "platform" to make it easier for people to discover, shop, and engage with local businesses. Creating a whole network of partners and businesses to share resources and create a positive impact on their community by keeping more dollars local. When the pandemic struck, he realized this need to help small businesses reach customers digitally was only going to get greater. So he decided to launch Local Maverick officially in April 2020, initially as a site to update people on what stores were doing locally and how to help them. From there, the concept grew very quickly!

Where the name derives from: We often get asked about our name. In the brainstorming stages of Local Maverick, Ryan had also just received his Predictive Index behavioral report which categorized him as a "Maverick" profile. The heading reads: "A Maverick is an innovative, ‘outside the box' thinker, who is undaunted by failure". This is where our name derives from. Local of course because our mission is to empower local communities & economies, and Maverick because we want to do this by challenging the status quo & being resilient. We believe all small business owners are Maverick’s in some way. You have to think big, but also stay grounded to complete the necessary day-to-day items, and never fear failure.

Local Maverick's Market is Born: Ryan has always had a passion for food & drink. He believes food has the power to impact so many aspects of life. We eat food for health, food connects to our identity and heritage, we eat food for joy, and we eat food together to build connections. This passion for food lead Ryan down the path of being introduced to The Burlington Farmer's market and learning more and more about local food systems + the importance of sourcing more food locally. Not only does it usually taste better, but it is also better for the planet! So from there, Maverick Market was born! With the goal of making it easier to shop with these incredible local producers, we launched a digital marketplace where people could shop from multiple businesses at once. To start, we only worked with 5 businesses! Stony Pond Farm, Maple Wind Farm, Agricola Farm, Nomadic Kitchen, and Sobremesa! Since the initial launch of Maverick Market, we hosted over 20 popup markets and have now grown to over 100 partners spanning food, drink, and craft products. We plan to keep growing our marketplace and add another 100 partners! This new storefront in Burlington will make that possible.

The Future: In the future, we hope to continue expanding our platform. We plan to open more stores and expand open, Maverick's Kitchen, which would be an immersive culinary incubator. At the end of the day, we want to develop an entire ecosystem that empowers local food, drink, and craft entrepreneurs. We can't wait to build the future of local with you!

WE CAN'T THANK YOU ENOUGH FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

With love, The Local Maverick Team