By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
The Ortonville Downtown Development Authority is encouraging people to shop small for Small Business Saturday on Nov. 27.
“We’re involved because it draws attention to small businesses and entrepreneurs. It’s a movement,” said DDA director Matt Jenkins. “It draws attention to our local, small businesses, and it creates some excitement. It’s an opportunity to show off our downtown.”
This year, the DDA will be doing ‘Scratch and Win’ cards at the participating businesses.
“It’s essentially our downtown dollars, in $5 and $10 amounts,” said Jenkins. “Shoppers on small business Saturday have a chance to scratch off and win.”
In addition to scratch-off cards, Oakland County and Shop Small provided shopping bags, giveaways and additional items to the DDA, which will be distributed to businesses to utilize how they see fit.
“It’s a multi-partnered effort,” said Jenkins. “We get the support from the county, we get the support from Shop Small. We have signed up to become a neighborhood champion, which allows us to utilize their branding, utilize their marketing materials, as well as coming up with local efforts that we can host to put a spotlight on the small businesses. “There will also be other things going on downtown on top of the sales in the DDA district businesses.
Small Business Saturday was created by American Express in 2010 as a way to support local retailers and small commerce shops. The idea continued and today the event is in more than 7,500 communities nationwide. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, small businesses comprise 99.9 percent of all U.S Businesses and employ 47 percent of all Americans.
“We will have a pop-up artisan market at old town hall, just to increase the amount of retail that we will have downtown that day, just creating more shopping options,” said Jenkins. “All the scratch off cards will be at the businesses that accept downtown dollars and we will be using the mobile app, Distrix, to indicate where those businesses are.”
Area businesses had something to cheer about following the 2019 holiday season.
On Nov. 30, 2019 Ortonville hosted their Small Business Saturday event in conjunction with hundreds of communities in a county-wide program. A total of 106 of the 2,066 county-wide entries registered during the ShopTextWin contest were from Ortonville. The tally of customers participating lifted the village to seventh across the county for number of entries on that day.
To participate, come to downtown Ortonville on Nov. 27 and shop the small businesses in the area.