Country Zest & Style Winter 2021 Edition

Virtual Shopping at Emmanuel’s Middleburg Marketplace

By Leonard Shapiro

Mary and Peter Hayes are helping guide Emmanuel’s new on-line Middleburg Marketplace.

The Christmas Shop offered by Emmanuel Episcopal Church has been a treasured Middleburg tradition for over 70 years, but the 2020 version had a far different look. Because of the pandemic, instead of shopping being up close and personal, with scads of merchants selling their wares to an eager clientele at the Middleburg Community Center, the event went virtual.

A soft opening in December mostly limited online shopping to church members, giving the Marketplace an early experimental go. While this initial online offering did not generate the revenues of the Christmas Shop, it opened an on-line window to a year-round internet shopping destination that will benefit the historic Emmanuel Church and the local charities it supports through grants.

They’re calling it the Middleburg Marketplace, and as the new year settles in, it’s starting to gather momentum.

This new approach has been developed by a committee of church members that includes Mary and Peter Hayes, Middleburg residents for 14 years and both highly accomplished business executives with cutting edge marketing experience. It doesn’t hurt that Emmanuel Rector The Rev. Gene LeCouteur, who has an MBA from Cornell, is also involved in the new venture.

Mary Hayes is co-chairing the effort along with Ellie Underwood, and they have recently added a general manager, Kathleen Barrett, and a marketing specialist, Sally Lowe. So far, more than 40 vendors/ merchants have signed up to sell their assorted wares online year-round, with special themed pages for holidays or other distinctive events. Many of the current merchants are area artisans offering oneof-a-kind art, sculpture, pottery, and jewelry. Mary Hayes said the goal is to increase the variety of inventory and the number of merchants by 10fold, including several Middleburg shops already preparing to soon join the marketplace.

“We tried had to have (the Christmas Shop) in person,” Mary Hayes said. “But we were facing two problems. What were the government guidelines going to be? How restrictive? And more than that, our merchants were having trouble envisioning selling in a fairly closed space. So we decided to do a virtual market.

“Once we started and were putting more and more into it, we decided to keep it open for the foreseeable future. It will produce income for the vendors, for the church and for the charities we support in this area. Our merchants feel very confident this is a good idea.”

The church will earn 15 percent of the sales, just as it always did from the Christmas Shop. They’re getting the word out on the Middleburg Marketplace all over social media—Instagram, Facebook and Twitter—as well as press releases, e-blasts and of course, word of mouth. Projections indicate the marketing campaign will reach close to six million potential customers during the first year.

Mary Hayes described the Middleburg Marketplace as a “curated website,” with a committee of church members who will screen potential merchants based on what they will be offering and their price points.

“We already have many unique items, artisanoriented,” she said. “Many of the merchants will be local. We have beautiful things, lots of art, mostly hand-crafted and much of it one of a kind…We’re also working to get more medium and lower priced items that are still high quality.”

In addition to historic Emmanuel’s Rector’s Discretionary Fund which assists people in need with medical and utility bills, rent and other expenses, local organizations that receive grants from the church include Middleburg F.I.S.H., the Windy Hill Foundation, Seven Loaves Food Pantry, A Place To Be and the Loudoun Abused Women’s Shelter.

Mary and Peter Hayes are helping guide Emmanuel’s new on-line Middleburg Marketplace.

For further information, go to middleburgmarketplace.com or middleburgmarketplace3@gmail.com