Janina Lear’s Piccadilly Market was a finalist in the Tourism and Hospitality and Best First Year categories of the 2017 Powercor Geelong Business Excellence Awards.
Janina says she has a passion and a real love for what she does, which involves supporting small and micro businesses and helping make unique, non-mass-produced products more mainstream.
She organises and runs her designer market with top-end designers, artisans, makers and creators, assisting them in bringing their high quality, unique products to the local marketplace.
Janina has run Piccadilly Market for the past eight years at Deakin University’s Waterfront campus, while also conducting pop-up events around Geelong.
Piccadilly Market stands out from other markets in the region for its siting indoors and for Janina’s full curating to guarantee stallholders of only high standard.
She spends weeks working out floor plans to ensure easy flow for shoppers and to separate similar product categories.
Janina applies a rigorous application process to select only the best stallholders to attend each market. The process also ensures great variety at each event without doubling up on the same products.
Beginning with 25 sellers in 2010, Janina had tripled the size her third market eight months later. She makes her income from stallholder and entry fees.
Each Picadilly Market now attracts anywhere from 2000 to 5000 people through the door, making it one of the more successful markets of its kind in the local area.
