A couple of weekends ago, my brother in law Chris, little boy Phil and I went on over to San Pedro to check out Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles‘ open house.

Have you heard of Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles? It’s super exciting! It’s like a year-round indie arts and crafts fair in a super-cool locale, making it possible for two things to happen:

1) Artists and crafters can have a solid place with reasonable monthly rates where they’re selling their work every single week, making it easy for their fans to find them consistently.

2) Shoppers will have a massive one-stop small business indie shopping experience every single week of the year.

I love the location of Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles – it’s in San Pedro, near all the boaty stuff. The port, you might say. The port of Los Angeles, to be even more specific. Chris and I had gotten Phil up from his nap to go to the open house, so he was pretty groggy in the car. Then we came over the big ol’ bridge, and he saw all the boats and shipping containers and everything else going on over there, and he went BANANAS.

The buildings are old and cool. We went hoping to geek out over industrial looking surroundings and we were NOT disappointed! Check out the inside of this place:

Seriously, I can’t wait to go shopping here. IT. LOOKS. SO. COOL!!!

Chris gave it a big ol’ thumbs up, but apparently Phil was unimpressed. Phil is a very tough customer.

But then a kind gentleman from Crafted gave Phil a cake pop from the vendors outside, and all was right with the world. It’s funny how cake can just make everything all better.

At that point, Phil pulled himself together and we really got to exploring Crafted’s warehouse space. There’s not enough I can say about how freaking amazing these warehouses are.

I can say you should probably keep this door closed. Thanks, you’re a peach.

Now, let’s get back to exploring!

We found this really cool old ladder on the wall, and of course had to make sure it was still operational. Where do these stairs go? They go up!

You’ll be happy to know the ladder works, guys! But I’m guessing it won’t be quite as accessible when Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles opens to the public on July 4th weekend.

Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles is still looking for indie artists, designers and crafters to fill out their roster for the grand opening. Hearts and Laserbeams is focused on providing graphic design services these days, so we’re not looking into renting space there, but we are really excited to share this info with all our friends that DO craft as their business. I met the gals that run Crafted at last month’s Craftcation Conference; they are super nice, and super driven to make this new shopping mecca work.

You can click here to see all of the indie businesses already on tap for this summer’s opening. It’s a pretty impressive list! You can bet the grand opening weekend is going to be stellar, and this is the kind of unique location that is going to draw both hard-core repeat shoppers and tourists to the southern California area alike.

Here’s info on booth pricing from the Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles website:

Market stalls are available in 10’x10’ increments and cost about $500 per month. For those of you with bigger products, you can rent as many 10×10’s as your heart desires. So a 10’x10’= $500; a 10’x20’= $1000… you can do the math from there.

If you add it up and break it down, you’re paying about $33 a day for a market stall, PLUS you get all the amenities – daily demos, monthly events, and the mega-marketing provided by us. The point of all of this – you rent the space, we make a marketplace that customers can’t resist.

· What? You say it sounds good, but you want MORE?

· Plug in to our power- $25 a month

· Secure high speed WIFI – tbd

· Vendor Spotlight on the CRAFTED AT THE PORT OF LOS ANGELES website, front page news for a month- $100

ALSO – scrolling down on their FAQ page reveals if you apply for a booth now as opposed to 6 months from now, you’ll get $25 off the application fee. NICE!