Juliet Gaudreau has been honing her artistic skills since she was 4 years old, specializing in sculptures. Gaudreau has now been at it for seven years, making her one of the more experienced entrepreneurs set up at Hurkamp Park on Friday night.
“I love to make art and being able to give my art to others is really exciting and important to me,” said Gaudreau, 11.
While First Friday festivities generated their typical buzz in downtown Fredericksburg, children from ages 5-17 years old worked booths and sold goods or products they’d created as part of a children’s entrepreneur market in the park.
The Children’s Entrepreneur Market in Hurkamp Park. (Photo by Noelle Clark.)
The Children’s Entrepreneur Market was founded in 2017 by Libertas Institute. It started with three locations in Utah and has since expanded to 146 cities and has hosted 263 markets around the country.
Along with the long list of juvenile vendors, the event featured live music, food trucks and about 500-800 patrons.
Juliet and her younger sister, 8-year-old Mae Gaudreau, sold their drawings, paintings, and sculptures they had been creating over the last year.
Juliet and Mae and their parents discovered the Children’s Entrepreneur Market on a web search a year ago and began to plan their businesses right away.
“We plan on using the money we make from the market tonight to go to Disney World,” said Mae Gaudreau. “We agreed with our parents we wouldn’t get any Christmas gifts this year and instead will go to Disney World in Florida as a family instead.”
Another booth sold bath products made by a group of teen girls under the business name “Sunset Scrubs.” Their crafted goods included bath salts, sugar scrubs, body butters, candles and more.
Juliet and Mae Gaudreau in front of their booth selling their artwork. (Photo by Noelle Clark.)
“We were really bored at the beginning of the summer and found the recipe to make a sugar scrub on Pinterest and it went from there,” said Sunset Scrubs co-creator Joleen Johnson. “Then we found out about the Children’s Entrepreneur Market in June and started making all the different products as fast as we could.”
The creative entrepreneurs behind the business Sunset Scrubs. (Photo by Noelle Clark.)
Johnson and her friends plan to bring Sunset Scrubs to the farmers market held in downtown Fredericksburg and to other markets dedicated to young entrepreneurs.
“The other markets that are dedicated primarily to children and their businesses don’t have another event until December and we decided we just didn’t want to wait that long to get started,” said Isabelle Lasco-Kauhi, co-creator of Sunset Scrubs. “So we crammed all that work in over the summer to be able to sell the stuff we have now and it worked out so well.”
All the creators involved in Sunset Scrubs will put any proceeds they make towards college.
