The embattled Northside Marketplace, which came under fire after many of its more than 100 vendors said they hadn’t been paid, will shut down at the end of the month.
The closure comes after original Northside Marketplace developer Joel Testa said in a May statement that he would take over the marketplace from Justin Lepley, who purchased it in 2022, and turn it into a vendor-led nonprofit.
In a Friday message to vendors, Testa said the “heartbreaking” decision to close the market came after he and his team had exhausted every option they could see to provide long-term stability.
“Unfortunately, after carefully evaluating the current financial condition—including the existing debt and liabilities—we simply cannot identify a responsible path to a sustainable future,” Testa wrote.
Northside Market’s last day will be July 31.
The news came as a shock to vendors, who said they were disappointed by the outcome. Takila Nuss, who owns Essential Dipped Delights, said she had no idea the news would be coming, while Jillian Klemm, who sells stickers and keychains as JillyJelly Art, said she hadn’t even been told by management about the closure.
“They never sent me an email,” Klemm said. “I’m just kind of sad to see it crumble this way.”
Financial realities, not mismanagement, led to closure, developer says
The marketplace was more than a business, Testa said in his email to vendors — it was a passion project. Testa said his vision was “to create a place where local entrepreneurs could test ideas, build businesses, and become part of something bigger.”
“We have always believed our community needs spaces that cultivate small retailers and help local businesses grow,” he wrote.
The market has always required financial support, he said. And in recent years, Testa said in response to questions from Signal Akron, it’s been a challenge to keep the space full and for vendors to afford rents after subsidies from The Knight Foundation, Downtown Akron Partnership and Testa Companies dried up.
While vendors accused Lepley of failing to pay them in a timely fashion — something Lepley acknowledged — he said the business had faced “significant financial challenges.”
Klemm said she’s still owed about $300. Testa said in an email that he plans to write off $250,000 in debt in the hopes the current operators will pay vendors what they’re owed. But he stopped short of saying that’s why Northside Marketplace will close.
“The reality of the current financial condition is not one of mismanagement by the previous operators, but merely that the model continued to have rising expenses that outweighed what the market could bare without a combination of significantly increased rents for vendors and still a substantial philanthropic contribution,” Testa wrote. “Businesses close when expenses outweigh income.”
He did not respond to further questions via email about what it would have taken to sustain the business. Lepley did not respond to a phone message or an emailed request for comment.
But Brent Wesley, the owner of Akron Honey and a member of the advisory board that was tasked with changing the business to a nonprofit, said he thought the group was going to find a way to salvage Northside Marketplace. Lepley didn’t make the hole the market was in on purpose, he said, but his actions filled it with knives and booby traps.
“I think it’s very obvious that it was mismanaged,” Wesley said. “Any time something like this happens, it exposes how naive we can be. We’ve got to be vetting people better.”
Marketplace was incubator for micro businesses
Wesley, who said he was paid the $2,356 he was owed, described Northside Marketplace as a springboard for his business, time and again. The space was “absolutely essential for economic development for small businesses,” he said.
“We lose a hub, we lose a gathering place, we lose recurring sales” with the closure, he said. Akron Honey had been making more than $22,000 a year selling there over nine years, and Wesley said taking money like that away from any small business is a hit.
Klemm recently removed her stickers from Northside Marketplace, before she knew it was closing, because when she saw she had only one sale recorded in three weeks, she learned that some of her wares were missing and had not been paid for. If vendors are actually getting paid, she said, the market is “a really good idea.”
“It’s really cool to go to one spot and buy from local vendors,” she said. “I love the idea of this marketplace.”
So does Julie Cajigas, a beach glass and fossil artist who sells at Ms. Takes By the Lake. Cajigas, who cleaned out her space on Friday, said she loved to spend money on people who were creating in the community. For microbusinesses who could never sustain their own brick-and-mortar store, she said, it was a way for them to be in front of potential buyers.
But with no guarantee that the makers were getting the money from what they sold, she said, Cajigas has put back items she would otherwise have purchased.
“I’ve just come to know the people that are in there and all the good things that they’re doing,” she said. “It was a little bit of a gut punch for everybody there.”
Future of restaurants remains unclear
In his email to vendors, Testa suggested they might want to consider selling at The Mercantile, a new downtown store set to have its soft opening in September.
Shane Wynn, one of the owners, said she has a different business model — she wants to buy items in advance, while those at Northside Marketplace were sold on consignment, meaning the market sold them on behalf of the vendors.
Still, she said, she hopes to incorporate locally made items where it makes sense to do so, such as in gift baskets.
“We hope to be a net for some of those vendors,” Wynn said. “We want to give a home to some of those who were displaced.”
Testa apologized for how abrupt the news of the closing was, saying in his email that the delay was because he was trying to find a path forward. In the email, he said he hoped to give every vendor a strong finish and to help them “sell as much inventory as possible before closing.”
“We are sorry we have not been able to communicate the progress with you better or sooner, but every day brought a new challenge we were working hard to overcome and we truly never had an answer that we felt we could count on coming to fruition,” Testa wrote.
What remain’s unclear is what happens to food vendors like Essential Dipped Delights — Nuss said she had been in the space since 2020 — and The Plannerz Place Eatery, where co-owner WyTerria Thornton said she spent $100,000 to build out its kitchen.
Nuss said she will be talking to Testa about what comes next but is confident this isn’t the end of her business.
“My feelings are hurt, I’m heartbroken,” she said. “My initial response is I’m upset, angry, sad.”
Thornton said she had been told The Plannerz Place Eatery could remain open for a few more months while Testa figured out what would happen to the space, but that she’s still trying to process what it means for the whole marketplace to close. She was “completely caught off guard” by the announcement, she said.
Her restaurant has been open there for three years, she said, and being at Northside Marketplace gave the business the opportunity to grow.
“It’s just disappointing, to say the least, that it came to such an abrupt end,” Thornton said.
