Why Tent Weights for Market Vendors

When people ask me what I’m working on, the answer almost feels so niche that it’s silly– “A tent weight for outdoor market vendors.” But it’s not a random niche. There’s a story behind my obsession over tent weights and market vendors (and a plan for more).

The tent that started it all.

One night I left my tent outside without checking the weather forecast. It rained hard that night and my tent didn’t make it. I woke up to find what was once a respite from the sun was now a pile of trash. Unemployed and with some time on my hands, I started wondering if I could design something better.

After talking to a bunch of people, I learned that almost everyone who’s used a popup canopy tent has a story about them collapsing, blowing away, or being a pain to use. For me, this validated my initial inkling that there might be something here. And with some experience as a product manager and a personal passion for the outdoors, it felt like it could be a good fit for me to scratch my entrepreneurial itch. 

Why outdoor market vendors? 

It’s a truism that when building a product you want to define a narrow target audience at the beginning. "I'm designing for everyone" is a surefire way to design for no one. So while popup canopy tents are used by a wide variety of people, I wanted to narrow who I was building for out of the gate.

I thought campers would be my first customers — after all, it's also a truism that building for yourself is easiest, and my friends and I use these tents for camping and festivals all the time. But as I kept spending weekends at farmers markets, talking to vendors and watching them set up, I realized they were the real pros of the popup world.

My wife worked for GrowNYC for years, so we’ve gotten to know a lot of market vendors personally and they have a place in my heart. They’re some of the hardest-working people out there — up at the crack of dawn, hauling heavy gear, setting up in every kind of weather, and doing it week after week to bring fresh food and hand-made crafts to neighborhoods around the country. These are the people who live with their tents. If anyone knows where the gear falls short, it’s them.

Plus, being able to talk to your potential customers is critical. I could walk around a market on a Saturday morning and find my entire target audience in one place, all using the very equipment I was designing for. They were easy to talk to, brutally honest, and always full of ideas.

Starting with a semi-professional demographic also made sense to me. Patagonia began with climbers. Carhartt started with railroad workers. YETI started with fishermen. Those companies earned credibility by solving real problems for the people who depend on their gear every day.

That’s what I wanted Burro to be: gear built for the people who use it hard.

If we can make something the pros love and rely on, we’ll have earned our way into every other corner of the outdoor world.

A few of the market vendors who have given me feedback along the way. I’m grateful to you all. 🙏

Why a tent weight? 

With some ideas from vendors and some anecdotal validation that I was onto something, I started experimenting with designing a tent — I sketched designs, talked to engineers, even had a tent prototype sewn. But once I started looking at what it would take to actually build a full tent, it became clear it would be a long, expensive, and arduous process. I wanted to bootstrap something, which meant I needed to be biased towards speed and cost.

So I started looking at canopy tent accessories. I tinkered with ideas for awnings, walls, and lighting systems, showed prototypes to friends and brought them to markets. I asked people what they liked and didn’t. That’s when I started noticing something that seemed almost universal: no two tent weight setups looked the same.

Every booth seemed to have a unique setup for weighing down their tent, and none of them looked like great solutions to me — crumpled sandbags, cinder blocks, buckets filled with concrete, dumbbells and bungee cords. While most of them were technically functional, it seemed clear that the existing options left a lot to be desired.

The tent weights that vendors use today

That’s when I started to think that tent weights could be the perfect starting point. They’re simple, essential, and used by nearly everyone who owns a tent. And since you need four per setup, I could hit minimum manufacturing runs without massive upfront costs.

When I started demoing a rough prototype that used the friction grip that now defines the Burro Tent Weight, I began to see encouraging enthusiasm from people I showed it to. So we kept marching down that path until we landed where we are today, with a tent weight built to take real abuse and genuinely easier to use than anything else out there.

The Burro Tent Weight

What's next?

The goal has never been just to make tent weights for market vendors. It’s to reimagine everything around the popup canopy experience with the same level of care and intention. I want Burro to become the go-to brand for all people who gather outdoors.

We’re starting with the most overlooked piece of the setup, but that’s the point. If we can make something as ordinary as a tent weight feel great to use, imagine what we can do next.