What it’s actually like
Brown Avenue sells the West as a costume, and most of the costume is made somewhere else. The Merchantile of Scottsdale is the building on that street where the goods are made here. Push through the door at 3965 North Brown and the room opens into a bright, 5,400-square-foot indoor marketplace of booths, racks and tables, each one belonging to a different Arizona maker: a candle company at one end, a ceramicist at the next table, a designer of graphic tees, a hat maker, a jeweler doing permanent bracelets on the spot, someone selling dog bandanas.
Eugene and Kimberly Pak opened it in 2019 on the co-retail model, which is a tidy way of saying many small brands share one lease. The vendor count moves — reports have put it anywhere from around 40 to well over 100 at different times — but the idea is constant. Kimberly Pak calls it an incubator: a place where a local designer or maker can have a real retail presence in the most-trafficked district in the city without the overhead of a storefront of their own.
The effect is closer to a permanent, air-conditioned craft fair than to a boutique, and that is a compliment. It is browseable in twenty minutes and rewarding for an hour. The Bright Side Café in the back pours coffee, which changes the math on a hot afternoon, and the calendar of Sip & Shop nights, workshops and pop-ups means the room is rarely the same twice.
What to buy
Something from a maker you can meet. The whole point. On weekends many vendors staff their own booths, and a candle or a print bought from the person who made it is the Old Town souvenir that actually means something.
A custom hat. Several of the makers work in the Western register the street demands, and a hat built here costs less than at the luxury outfitters a block away.
Permanent jewelry. A fine chain welded on at the wrist, done on site, which has become the marketplace’s signature impulse purchase.
Arizona-made gifts. Ceramics, artwork, candles, pet accessories and souvenirs that are not the same three magnets sold on every corner of the district.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
Brown Avenue street parking is scarce and mostly short-term. Park free in the Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and walk west along Main Street or 2nd Street; it is a flat five minutes. The Old Town on foot note maps the loop and the Old Town guide covers the wider district.
Weekend afternoons are the liveliest, with the most vendors in the building and the most going on, and also the most crowded. Weekday mornings are the quiet browse. High season from January through April brings the snowbirds and spring-training visitors who are the makers’ best customers, and the Saturday Old Town Farmers Market at the Civic Center makes a natural pairing. In February, Parada del Sol runs the parade right past the Western blocks, and the marketplace is a cool place to retreat to afterward. In summer, go in the morning and stay for the café.
Eat while you’re there
The coffee is already inside. For a proper meal, The Mission on Brown Avenue is the modern Latin room a few doors away, and the Rusty Spur Saloon around the corner on Main Street is the 1921 bank turned honky-tonk that makes the Western blocks feel earned. Los Olivos on 2nd Street has fed downtown since 1947, and Cien Agaves at Brown and First Avenue is the tequila-and-tacos option when the day turns into evening.
How it got here
Scottsdale has tried the many-makers-one-roof idea before. The Arizona Craft Center, a cooperative workshop and showroom founded in 1947, gathered the town’s silversmiths, potters and weavers until it burned in 1950; Craftsman Court was built in 1955 to rehouse them; and the Kiva Craft Center on Fifth Avenue put a colony of studios around Lloyd Kiva New’s fashion house in the same decade. The makers’ marketplace is, in other words, one of the oldest retail formats in the city, and one that Old Town had largely lost by the 2010s, when downtown rents pushed anyone without a national brand or a gallery’s margins out of the district.
Eugene and Kimberly Pak revived it in 2019 with a modern name for the model: co-retail. Rather than a co-op of artisans running a shared showroom, The Merchantile leases booth space to independent local designers, makers and small businesses and handles the storefront, the staffing and the foot traffic, which on Brown Avenue is considerable. Kimberly Pak has described it as an incubator, and the description fits. A candle maker who sells online and at weekend markets can test a real retail presence in the busiest district in Scottsdale without signing a lease she cannot carry, and the ones who outgrow the booth move on to storefronts of their own.
The timing looked unlucky and turned out to be fortunate. The marketplace was less than a year old when the pandemic emptied downtown in 2020, but the format that followed — small local brands, a big airy room, a café, events — was exactly what the 2020s shopper came back wanting. The vendor roster swelled, with reports counting anywhere from 40 to more than 100 makers at different points, The Bright Side Café in the back turned a browse into an hour, and Sip & Shop nights, workshops, pop-ups and permanent jewelry gave people reasons to return. Local roundups have since rated it among the Valley’s top artisan marketplaces, and the concept has spread to a small group of Merchantile marketplaces elsewhere in Arizona.
For a district that spent decades selling the Southwest made elsewhere, that is a meaningful correction. The Craft Center’s founders would recognize the room.