I started a neighborhood-wide garage sale in Avondale, then designed and built everything it needed to exist: the brand, the site, the live shopper map, the print campaign, and the social presence.
No event, no host list, no infrastructure. Just a neighborhood that needed a reason to open up on the same Saturday.
Action
Built the brand, the site, and the campaign that filled it
Registration and a live shopper map, 500 flyers and 30 yard signs through a local sponsor, a new Instagram account, and outreach to ward offices and local press.
Result
102 host households in year one, and it runs again in 2027
Sign-ups went from 9 to 102 in five weeks. Roughly 40% of everyone who reached the register page completed it, against a typical 10 to 20%.
How it started
One neighborhood's sale, borrowed.
Last May I went to the Ravenswood Manor garage sale and could not believe the turnout. Whole blocks were participating, and the sidewalks and alleys were packed with buyers. Somewhere in the middle of it I thought, why doesn't Avondale have this? I put together a working mockup the next day.
The Avondale Neighbors Association happened to be meeting down the street from me the following night. I brought the mockup, leadership told me I was talking that evening, and the room was into it. The site went up as a subdomain on their domain, and from there it turned into a real event with a real date.
I called around to local print shops until Act Now Print & Promote agreed to sponsor. They produced 500 flyers and 30 vinyl yard signs in exchange for placement on the collateral and a spotlight on the site. I built out an Instagram presence to reach local businesses and give sellers and shoppers another way in, then contacted the three aldermen who represent Avondale, the Cook County Commissioner for the 12th district, and Block Club Chicago. All of them put the sale in their event emails.
After that it was mostly sitting back and watching it happen. Rain cut through the middle of the day and cleared into a beautiful afternoon, foot traffic was strong once it did, and I met more neighbors in six hours than I had in years. Everyone wanted to know if it was happening again next year.
The Site
Register, then plan a route.
The site does two jobs. Before the sale it recruits hosts and answers the question everyone had, whether they needed a permit. On the day itself it turns into a shopper tool. I designed it and built it with Claude handling the engineering, which is how one person ships a live map, registration, and route planning alongside the flyers and the yard signs. Here is what that looked like from a shopper’s phone.
Scroll the walkthrough · tap any screen to enlarge
Step 01Day of, the homepage switches over. 102 neighbors are signed up and the live map is one tap away.Step 02Scroll down and every registered sale is on the map, all 102 of them, inside the boundary.Step 03Filter by what you are actually after. Home and kitchen plus plants narrows the map to those stops.Step 04Tap a dot for the address, the hours, and what that house put out. Add it to your route from there.Step 05Keep adding stops. The list reorders by drag, and you can type in an address the map missed.Step 06Open the finished route in Google Maps and go start the treasure hunt.
Registration sat at 9 households after four weeks of word of mouth. Flyers went out on June 17 and 18, yard signs and Instagram followed on the 20th, and sign-ups went from 1 the week before to 18 that week. No week after that fell below 14. Act Now Print & Promote produced all of it, 500 flyers and 30 vinyl yard signs, in exchange for placement on the collateral.
Flyer
Yard sign
The first sign goes up
Social
Built the account from zero.
A new Instagram account launched alongside the yard signs, running one category at a time so shoppers knew what was actually going to be out there. Vinyl led the series because collectors will travel for it. Posts are best viewed on Instagram, where the audio and captions are part of them.
I had analytics running from the day the flyers went out, so year one came with real numbers instead of guesses. I wrote up the full season as a report for the association: channel attribution, how hosts arrived week by week, how shoppers used the map, and a recommended permanent date for 2027.
102
Host households
2,400
Site visitors
40%
Register page conversion
2,237
Map marker taps
Read the 2026 season report
Nine sections on where visitors came from, how hosts signed up week by week, what shoppers did on the map, and the plan for year two.
