The new Bremen Village Shops offer a new kind of shopping experience
BREMEN, Ind. -- The Bremen Village Shops opened in downtown Bremen this weekend, debuting a new nine-shed outdoor marketplace at 125 East Plymouth Street built to house local small businesses.
The project began as a Leadership Marshall County initiative and is led by founder and managing director Amber Reed. Each of the nine sheds is occupied by a small business entrepreneur, including a coffee shop, a sourdough bakery, handcrafted jewelry and home goods makers, resale boutiques, a custom laser-engraving studio, and a rotating shed reserved for nonprofits and first-time business owners.
Several of the businesses, including a children's clothing resale shop and a fashion boutique, were operating online only until this opening and made their first brick-and-mortar debut at the marketplace.
The marketplace is open weekends through the second weekend of December, with Saturday hours from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday hours from 1 to 5 p.m. On the fourth Friday of each month, the site hosts live music and food trucks from 5 to 9 p.m. Organizers said the goal is to give small business entrepreneurs an affordable path to a physical storefront while drawing foot traffic back to Bremen's downtown.
The opening weekend drew shoppers through the shed row and gave the businesses their first in-person customers, marking a visible step in a community-driven effort to support local makers and strengthen the town's small-business economy.
Amber Reed, the founder of Bremen Village Shops and owner of Studio 574, told us "In Illinois, these are all over the place. This is the first in Indiana, and our group was focusing on economic development for Marshall County, and so I presented them with this idea of an incubator shopping experience, and what started on paper as five sheds on the north side of this parking lot has turned into a village.
To see all the people on the sidewalk, going between here, going to the other shops in the area, going down to the tractor show, it was like I was back in my childhood, growing up here in town, and just seeing our downtown alive again, and that's really what we wanted to do."
Greta Hochstetler, the owner of Maple & Honey added "I just want a sense of community, I want them to feel known, like I know your name, I know what you drink, you know I've seen you before. Welcome back."