Co. Studio

Co. Studio is the brainchild of local Melbourne designer and artist Claire Osman. After months of researching & experimenting extensively into the properties of kelp, Co. Studio will be bringing their unique handmade homewares to the market. Made solely from dried seaweed & resin, this beautiful line of homewares are naturally moulded into shape.

The materials and method of her practice are both highly sustainable and unique, and with an interest to further the exploration of other seldom used materials, be sure to keep an eye out for Co. Studio in the future.

Greg Mann

An interview with Greg Mann - Jeweller. "As a student of the arts, I was attracted to working with textural details, ending with a Fine Art degree in Gold and Silver smithing. My development towards a professional career has often been a process of making the common place more precious.

My inspirations involve an environmental awareness believing in the need to recycle - and upcycle discarded things to create more desirable objects.

A continual process of collection, collation and planning is a result of responses to the items found. The studio has an inevitable stream of new works produced and an ever broadening range of collections in the works.

Holding market stalls offers me an interface with the public that helps my business in many ways. Not only do I gauge reactions to my work, but also the exposures to increase my networks."

Able and Game

We are Able and Game and we make greeting cards from our studio in Brunswick. Anna has a fine art background and Gareth has a computer science background. We put these two skills together to create our little card business. We both work on the card concepts together with Anna doing all the illustration. Gareth grew up in Scotland and Anna grew up on a sheep farm in East Gippsland. We love watching TV, watching people and looking at everything and how it relates to a card. We just went over to Hobart recently and visited Mona which was really amazing. So many rock star artists. Oh and cats and booze also seem to feature strongly in the cards so I guess they are big inspirations.

We just got a new printer, so lots of ideas are coming from all the things we can do with paper now. We love being able to create our own products so we can release lots of weird and wonderful things.

We have been doing Rose Street for a few years now and it really did help Able and Game get started. We love having a little mini shop set up every weekend and talking to the customers about which cards they love. We often say we love hearing people laughing at the cards and share stories after each market on who we spoke to on the day.

Pirdy

What started out as a bit of fun quickly turned into a thriving homewares and accessories business for Juliet Carr, the energetic designer of label Pirdy. With a background in visual merchandising and retail management, Juliet completed a casting course a little over 5 years ago and today boasts an ever expanding product range all made by hand (including molds and pigments) so it's little wonder that her products consistently wow and excite an eager market crowd.

Inspired by nature, nostalgia and colour, expect to find gorgeous Humming Birds, bright Peacocks for your home and some very 80s inspired jewellery!

Juliet loves the market for giving her the opportunity to chat with customers, seeing their reaction to her work and just generally being inspired by the creativity around the space.