A longtime vendor at Akron’s Northside Marketplace pulled all of his products from the space, citing ongoing issues with payments and a lack of communication from management.
Brent Wesley, founder and owner of Akron Honey, took to social media on Monday to share the news. “I had to temporarily pull the product here. The reason why: We just aren’t getting paid,” Wesley said in a video posted to Akron Honey’s Instagram and Facebook accounts.
In the posts, Wesley said he is owed “just under $4,000” from Northside Marketplace
Wesley first realized he wasn’t getting paid in early 2025. At that point, Akron Honey hadn’t received payment in almost a year, he said. (Akron Honey sells its merchandise at dozens of locations in the area, from coffee shops and local restaurants to large grocery stores.)
Wesley discovered the missed payments after being tipped off by another Northside Marketplace vendor, Travis Howe of Fat T’s Cookies. While doing his taxes in 2025, Howe — who closed his business in February — noticed an issue with his income.
“When I was doing my 2024 taxes, I was going through some payments, and I’m like, ‘Man, my books don’t look right.’ I noticed it, and I reached out to a handful of vendors, [Wesley] being one of them,” Howe said.
At that time, Howe said he was owed between $2,000 and $3,000. When he notified Northside Marketplace about the missed payments, Howe was connected with the owner, Justin Lepley. Howe eventually received the money he was owed. When he asked what caused the delays, he said Lepley told him that the issue was related to cash flow.
Northside Marketplace owner acknowledges issues with payments
Northside Marketplace, located at 21 Furnace St. in the Northside District near Luigi’s Restaurant, sells products from more than 100 vendors. Unlike other markets where vendors handle their own sales, Northside has one point-of-sale system. This means customers pay for all their purchases at once rather than paying individual vendors. Northside takes 5%; the rest goes back to the vendors.
This also gives vendors more freedom because they do not need to be at the market in person to make a sale. Vendors are supposed to receive payments every two weeks.
In response to Akron Honey’s social media post, Lepley shared a statement on Northside Marketplace’s Facebook account. He acknowledged the delays in payment and said vendors have “every right to feel frustrated.”
In the statement, Lepley said Northside Marketplace faced “significant financial challenges” when he purchased the business in 2022 from its previous owners, Testa Companies. He said his team has “worked to make meaningful changes toward long-term sustainability,” but it has continued to experience financial struggles, which “have resulted in delayed payments to vendors.”
In an interview with Signal Akron, Lepley said it costs about $20,000 a month to operate Northside Marketplace. He added that, for the first three months of 2026, the market brought in about $12,000 to $13,000 per month. In 2025, the average monthly revenue was around $17,000, he said.
“We took over when the marketplace was struggling in 2022 and have been working to maintain it,” Lepley said. “We were down to just a handful of vendors. COVID was a real challenge for the marketplace.”
He said payment delays to vendors started in 2025 but have become more of a challenge in 2026.
“Any delay in payment for a small business is critical,” Lepley said. “I am 100 percent sympathetic to that.”
When asked if vendors are notified when payments will be late, Lepley said, “There have been different communications at different times throughout the process, but it kind of depends on which payments and when. But I’ve tried to be especially transparent as of recently as their delays have been more consistent.”
Lepley said payments to most vendors are “behind at least one [pay] period,” and some “are more significant.” He said he didn’t know how many vendors are significantly behind in receiving payments.
He also “did not have an exact amount” of how much money the vendors are currently owed or know how many vendors have left the marketplace because of payment issues.
“We’re actively seeking outside partnership from some of the foundations, or even a city or municipal partner to try to help supplement the cost of operating the marketplace so we can continue to provide the services that we do and remain operational,” Lepley said.
He declined to comment on what those potential partnerships might look like because they are still in the early stages.
Lawsuits, liens and unpaid taxes
Court records discovered by Signal Akron on Tuesday detail a convergence of multiple civil lawsuits and recent court-ordered garnishment of Lepley’s bank account and wages in two separate lawsuits.
He was sued by a debt collection agency last year in the Akron Municipal Court and a judge ordered more than $3,000 to be garnished from Lepley’s bank account in September. He lost the lawsuit by default when he never responded to it.
Lepley was also sued by Citibank in 2023 for more than $5,000. Court records show he also lost that case because he did not respond to it and, shortly after losing the 2025 case last fall, the court ordered his wages from the University of Mount Union to be garnished. According to court records, that garnishment began in December of 2025.
Records from the Summit County Court of Common Pleas also detail that the Ohio Department of Taxation filed 29 separate judgment liens against Lepley personally in the last 15 months and 54 against three of his other companies.
Akron Honey owner receives partial payment
After sharing the video on Akron Honey’s channels, Wesley said Lepley contacted him.
“He sent me an email yesterday after I posted. He said he was sending me a certain amount of money, and scheduled a payment and sent me the screenshot of [a payment of] like $1,766,” Wesley said.
Wesley forwarded Signal Akron an email chain between him and Lepley dating back to February 2025. The back-and-forth exchange details ongoing occurrences of missed payments. In an email from last December, Wesley includes a screenshot of a spreadsheet detailing what Akron Honey is owed from Northside Marketplace. The amount totaled just over $17,000.
The final email in the chain was sent on Sunday by Wesley notifying Lepley that he had pulled Akron Honey’s products.
Other vendors leave, cite late payments as the reason
For others, the response from Northside Marketplace came too late.
Several former and current vendors responded in the comments of Wesley’s Facebook post with similar stories of not being paid.
For two years Aaron Gascon ran Modern Traditions Co., a vintage clothing shop at Northside Marketplace. But after continued issues with late payments, he left in October.
Gascon paid $1,400 per month to rent a space at Northside. Often, in lieu of being paid for his merchandise sales, Gascon said Lepley would give him a rent credit. But with no actual money coming in, this system made it difficult for Gascon to buy new merchandise, which in turn affected his sales.
Gascon said at one point he was owed about $5,000. He is unsure if he is still owed money. Because his sales dwindled so much, Gascon said that, in the end, he might have broken even after factoring in rent.
“It just became this vicious cycle of, I don’t want to keep putting product in here, because I’m not receiving any of the sales,” Gascon said.
Another former vendor, Samantha Basille, pulled her products in April after experiencing similar issues. Basille is the owner of the coffee roaster Sappho and Her Beans. She sold her products at Northside and also provided coffee beans wholesale to NOMZ, the restaurant inside the marketplace, which Lepley also owns. Basille said the number of missed payments got so bad that in January she stopped paying the $200 a month rent on her space.
“I had calculated that my unpaid sales were, like, $230, $250. Then they owed me about $800 for unpaid wholesale,” she said.
Once Basille decided to leave, she told Lepley to apply the missed payments to the outstanding amount she owed in rent — the remainder was paid out to her. Fortunately for Basille, Northside wasn’t her only retail location. Sappho and Her Beans can be found at several locations in Akron and Cleveland.
“I’m thankful that I was in a position to be able to make that decision and not just completely nuke my business over it,” she said. “I feel really, really bad for all the people who are vendors at Northside who are having their monies withheld and don’t have any other opportunities or avenues.”
While Wesley of Akron Honey hasn’t officially left Northside Marketplace, he is uncertain whether he’ll return if he receives the money he is owed.
“It’s risky going back to them,” Wesley said. “One of the best predictors of future behavior is what that person has done already.”
He continued, “We built a following, something that may have been one of the first success stories in the Northside Marketplace. Nine years. … We did it. And then now I have to turn that off.”
