The Grand Rapids Downtown Market has released its 2016 impact report, highlighting many of the successes the market has had in the past year. The report boasts $12.6 million in annual sales, over 90 new jobs created and nearly 700,000 visitors in the past year. Downtown Market Director of Community Relations Kate Klemp says, the numbers exceeded market official’s expectations.
“We knew we were an economic engine, we just didn’t realize how great of an economic engine we were,” Klemp said. “Our original idea for this annual report was to do a little bit of research and understand our story a little bit more, and what we discovered was our community impact is reverberating throughout West Michigan.”
Part of that community impact Klemp says is the market’s mission to provide a place for entrepreneurs and business start-ups to test out there ideas in the downtown market’s incubator.
“It’s interesting because incubators, obviously, you talk about incubators like ‘hatching eggs’ we are hatching new businesses,” she said.
9 new business in the last year according to the Market’s impact report. In addition 55% of the businesses in the incubator are female owned.
