Courtney and Kyle are residents of Miami's Omni neighborhood, situated right in the action between Wynwood and Downtown. To combat the chaos, they'll typically start their days at Margaret Pace Park. "It's very urban, but super relaxing just walking and sitting there by the water," says Kyle. "It's really nice in the mornings."
When they set out to create their now-thriving Magic City Flea, Courtney Bower and Kyle Hazlewood realized pretty quickly: There’s no wikiHow page for starting a flea market.
After meeting at Boston College and graduating amid the pandemic, the couple spent a six-month stint in Bower’s hometown of Rochester, New York, where Hazlewood picked up his girlfriend’s knack for vintage reselling, and the two embedded themselves in the area’s bustling flea market scene.
Fast forward to November 2021 in Miami, where Hazelwood grew up. The pair were in between jobs and eager to find that community that had welcomed them in and given them a common purpose in Upstate New York. It didn’t exist, so they pooled their resources and built it themselves.
“We were prepping for months and months, driving around Miami, taking pictures of lots that we thought could potentially work,” Bower remembers.
“There was no repository of information to tell us what to do,” Hazlewood chimes in. “If you Google ‘How to start a flea market,’ it's a bunch of articles on how to start selling out of flea markets. No, no, no—we want to start the whole market.”
Instead, they visited the same administrative office seven times until they’d finally filled out all the correct forms and pulled all the required permits. (They learned a lot, like if you want a portable toilet at your event, you’ll need to pull a building permit.)
The first Magic City Flea opened in Wynwood in April 2022, the name and branding an homage to the couple’s love of history and Miami’s latest renaissance of independent restaurants and small shops, and the sense of possibility they inspire. In the nearly two years since they embarked on this journey, Bower and Hazlewood have grown their humble flea market to an eclectic weekly pop-up with 12,000 followers, dozens of vendors and a team of five.
And though Bower and Hazlewood have taken on full-time “day jobs” since launching their project, neither has any plans to slow down. “It’d be really cool to be like a Brooklyn Flea of Miami,” Bower says when considering what Magic City Flea might look like in five years. Hazlewood envisions building on their experience to create even more activations around the city, from food concepts to festivals and beyond.
“It’s the community aspect of it,” Bower says of their driving force, especially coming out of the pandemic. “You're seeing neighbors become really good friends…and you all have this common interest, which is just fashion and sustainability.”
“It goes so deep and there are so many niches and so many interesting characters you meet,” Hazlewood adds. “[At Magic City Flea,] they can feel comfortable and be creative...it's like another home for them.”
