A Moment with Flea Style’s Brittany Cobb

Flea Style founder- Brittany Cobb (Image Provided by Flea Style)

It has been a few years ago since I had first met Brittany Cobb, and had heard about the Flea Style market brand. It was when they had expanded their market to Houston, and I had the chance to check it out. Three years later, the brand is still going strong, and is expanding! They now have an online shop, and will be opening up a retail space and studio this spring!

I had the chance to have coffee with the former lifestyle editor-turned-entrepreneur one morning, while she was in town for Flea Style Houston. It was interesting getting to know her as not only a cool mom, wife, fellow vintage lover, but also one heck of a girlboss.

She was born in California. Growing up, her interior designer mother and she would go junking, combing through antique malls, looking for unique pieces for clients, and even their home. She would also help her mom decorate and style her booth at an antique mall on some days. She enjoyed that shopping lifestyle, and had that certain ‘eye’ for style and design.

She majored in journalism at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. While there, she noticed that while the city had some incredible malls, that certain shopping lifestyle that she was accustomed to was lacking. After she graduated and went off to New York City, she worked for notable publications, such as: Lucky and Forbes. She was able to dabble back into that familiar shopping experience of going to flea markets on a more regular basis, especially since it was more affordable.

Some years passed, and she moved back to Dallas and worked for Daily Candy. “If I’m going to be in Dallas for awhile, I need to create this thing {shopping experience} if no one else is going to… I have a group of people I can pull together and I think Dallas will respond too. There are people out there that enjoy junking and the thrill of the hunt, but they want it more on a silver platter…More curated and cleaned up for them. I knew that, and made it what I called, a ‘curated flea market.’ I did my first event December 2009. I had started the company in September, and it took four months to pull together. Literally, the weekend before the show, I was laid off; so the timing was perfect. So it became a ‘maybe it shouldn’t be a hobby, maybe it needs to be a way I transition into my career, because I needed to find something for myself.’ When I was laid off, I had this whole new set of eyes on this concept, like ok, this could be my thing. A thousand people showed up {to the flea} and loved it. They were excited to see something like that in Dallas. So I did that for five years, just as a part-time thing, and I just keep building on that momentum. It was called Dallas Flea, and as my life was shifting, so was the flea’s. There were years where I was all about it, and do three or four shows, and then there were years where I was having children, pregnant, or sick, and I had to dwindle it down.” While she was doing the flea, she also started dabbling in interior design as well, and found that it was a natural talent, and something she really enjoyed. But there came a point where she had to choose between the flea or the interior design career, as it was affecting the fact that she wanted to be a good wife, mother and wanted a better work-life balance.

She chose the flea because she knew it had so much more potential. She changed the venue, put more vendors in the mix, and hired a publicist for the first time to get the message out. Once that happened, it just exploded… she went from having 1,000 people in attendance for the first show, to almost 6,000.

“Flea Style is really the child of Dallas Flea. I wanted to take it beyond Dallas, so I launched Flea Style three years ago, on December 1st… It put Houston on the map over the course of six months.” They do four events per year, as well as launched Flea Style Summit, the online shop, and their own label (where vendors will make things under the Flea Style name). “It’s become this creative company that’s all about supporting small business in various facets. But that always comes back to our timeline of handmade, vintage, and one-of-a-kind in the small business community.”

When asked about her favorite vendors… “I have a real soft spot for those that have been with me since day one. I have about fifty that fall into that category. Those that have continued with me (maybe dropping out a couple times to do a wedding or whatnot) because they’ve been with me, they’re the reason I’ve grown. I love working with all of them because I’m just watching their dream unfold in front of our eyes, but really the ones that appreciate what we do. We have birthday parties together… I’ve been to gatherings with them… They’ve become my friends.. even my employees…It’s just really cool doing (this business) authentically, slowly, all the best intentions… We pour our hearts and souls into these events.”

Brittany and her team put on another good Flea Style market in Houston in 2017. See photos below from the event.