Since opening his first store in Palm Springs last year, Mojave Flea founder, James Morelos has done more than $7 million in sales, and expanded to locations in Yucca Valley, San Francisco and soon Berkeley, California, and Hudson Valley, New York.
, spent time running a design store in Brooklyn, New York, and moved to the desert in 2018. He first brought his pop-up markets to the Ace Hotel, then pivoted to his own brick-and-mortar stores when he saw opportunity — and people fleeing the cities — during COVID-19.
“We want to create a vintage paradise,” says Morelos, who is self-funded but open to taking on investors. “There is this whole growing movement of taking dead stock or vintage textiles and making new things out of them. So nothing in Market Market will be newly manufactured.” “Our point of view is, if you try to open your own 100- to 200-square-foot store, it’s not only going to cost you more, you will never have the foot traffic that we have. It’s about power in numbers, you know what I mean? And do you want to sit there or do you want to manage someone to sit there? We are a retail solution,” says Morelos. “People are figuring out we can be open seven days a week, and they don’t have to be.
“It’s not a homogenous, singular-point-of-view store, every 10 feet there is a whole other brand expression,” says Morelos. “I really believe that the overdesigned, overwrought, million-dollar interior — that’s over. No one needs that. What they want is brand discovery, shopping things that they’ve never seen before and a meaningful experience.”Brandon Harman for WWD
Morelos grew up in L.A. and moved to Seattle in the ’90s to work in the music business, and eventually Rudy’s Barber Shop at the first Ace Hotel. “I fell in love with being surrounded by creatives, and it influenced the trajectory of my life,” he says of the experience.He landed in New York City to work at Bumble and Bumble in 2001, opened his own salon in Williamsburg in Brooklyn in 2002, then made his first foray into retail, opening Scandinavian Grace in 2007.
After bringing his flea market concept west in 2018, he fell in love with Palm Springs — enough to move to the desert community in the heat of July.