Market · seller intake 01
A shopfront on this marketplace is a page with your name on it, your photographs, your words and your culture attached. Listing costs nothing, and the first edition carries no commission. Submissions are open now, and the shopfronts go live in spring 2027.
Free to list · no commission in the first edition · every submission read by a person
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Cost to list | Nothing |
| Commission | None — the deal is yours |
| Photos | Three, minimum |
| Description | 300 characters, minimum |
| Moderation | By hand, before it publishes |
| Live | Spring 2027 · submissions open now |
The marketplace carries whatever a culture in this city makes, cooks, plays or builds. Six doors cover almost everyone who writes to us.
Categories double as the catalogue filter · a listing sits in exactly one
Six categories · a seventh opens when enough submissions ask for it
A shopfront and its listings are built from the same handful of parts. Everything below arrives from you; we lay it out, check it and publish it.
| Part | What it holds | The bar |
|---|---|---|
| Name | Your business name, or your own name | The name a buyer will see and search for |
| Culture | The community the work belongs to | One, chosen by you · it becomes a filter and a link |
| Category | Which of the six doors you came through | One per listing |
| Photographs | The object, the food, the ensemble, the room | Three at a minimum · daylight, in focus, the real thing |
| Description | What it is, how it is made, what it is for | 300 characters at a minimum, in your own words |
| Price | A guide price, or the word negotiable | Marked plainly either way · no hidden number |
| About you | Two or three paragraphs on your shopfront page | Written by you · this is the part people read twice |
| Contact | Email, phone or a social page | At least one route that you actually answer |
01 · photographs
Daylight beats a lamp. A plain wall beats a busy kitchen. Shoot the object you are selling from three angles, fill the frame with it, and send the largest files you have — 1600 pixels on the long side gives us room to crop. A photograph of somebody else's product, a stock image or a picture with a watermark on it comes straight back to you. For food, show the dish plated and the packaging it arrives in. For music, a live clip carries further than a portrait.
02 · description
Search engines skip a listing that says "handmade earrings, $40" and they carry one that says which technique, which region, which materials and how long it takes to make. Three hundred characters is roughly four sentences, which is the floor rather than the target. Name the thing, the tradition, the materials and the occasion somebody buys it for. Write it in your own voice — a shopfront that sounds like a person outsells a shopfront that sounds like a catalogue.
Listing is free, the first edition carries no commission, and the whole of the price stays with the person who made the thing.
Money changes hands between you and your buyer, off this site entirely, and the festival stands nowhere near it. The band above is the whole of the answer; the lines below are how it holds.
| Stage | What it does | What we take on | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopfront | Catalogue, listing pages, a message that reaches the seller. Deals agreed off this site. | Reading every listing before it appears. | Spring 2027 |
| Requests | Enquiries, their history and a status, inside the participant account. | Answering a dispute between two parties. | After the first festival |
| Payments | Payment, delivery, refunds, and a commission arriving with them. | Terms of sale, tax handling, refunds, dispute resolution, support. | Year three, if sellers ask for it |
Every listing is read by a person before it publishes. Moderation from the first day is the only thing that stops a festival catalogue turning into a yard sale inside a month.
Thirteen lines, applied to every listing the same way. A refusal always arrives with the line it broke written out, and Marketplace rules carries each one with its reason beside it.
The short list · the reasons live in the rulebook
One form. It takes about ten minutes if your photographs are already on your phone, and a person answers every one of them by hand.
Intake 01 · marketplace · free, and it commits you to nothing
Anything missing here reaches us through the form, and the answer usually ends up on this page.
Nothing. No listing fee, no commission, no charge for a better position in the catalogue. Whether a commission ever appears is a decision due in year two, tied to whether payments ever run through this site, and sellers hear it first.
Spring 2027, alongside the rest of the marketplace section. Submissions are open now so the catalogue opens with real sellers in it.
The site holds one answering standard, ten working days from submission to an answer, held from the day the queue opens. The answer is either a publish or a short list of what to fix — most often a sharper photograph or a longer description.
No connection to the festival is required. A shopfront stands on its own all year. Sellers who are also approved participants carry a mark saying so.
Packaged, sealed and shelf-stable food lists freely — spice blends, preserves, coffee, honey, dried goods. Cooking for the public to eat straight away needs an approved kitchen and a public-health permit, and the catering category is where that conversation starts.
Take a third. A phone in daylight against a plain wall clears the bar, and a listing with three angles on it outperforms a listing with one by a distance that is easy to measure.
Stage one puts a Request button on your listing and passes the message to the contact you gave us. Everything after that — price, delivery, payment — is between you and them.
The full French mirror of this site is in preparation. Send your description in both languages if you have both, and it publishes bilingually the day the mirror opens.
The festival office reads every listing. A refusal arrives with the reason written out, and a reply to that email reopens it. Where a listing touches a community's sacred or ceremonial material, we ask that community before we decide.
A shopfront is one of four doors this festival opens to somebody who makes things. The other three are here.
Market & partners · the rest of the section
130+ diplomatic missions are accredited in Canada and the great majority of them are here, and the communities that came with them shop here every week. Give them a page with your name on it.