Shopping locally is always fun, but thanks to a few creative minds, shopping locally on Friday will be even more fun than usual. Meet Kerri Johnson, who's one of the directors of Blankspace Gallery and the Oakland Art Gallery, and who is now trying to convince people to shop at their neighborhood boutique instead of at the malls outside Oakland. She's one of the organizers of Plaid Friday, an alternative to Black Friday.

OB: What's with the plaid? It's cool and all, but why is plaid the theme?

Kerri: The idea of plaid came from us wanting an alternative name to "Black Friday," we (Lena Reynoso of the Compound gallery) wanted something that expressed the idea of the community and the diversity of the local businesses in the Bay Area. We kicked around other color names, but the plaid seemed to sum up the idea nicely, independent, interwoven colors working in harmony to create a whole image.

OB: Who came up with this idea and why? What was the inspiration?

Kerri: Myself and Lena Reynoso. We were working together to create our big annual holiday shopping event and wanted to open earlier this year. Once we decided to open the day after Thanksgiving, it seemed natural for us to try and promote ourselves as an alternative to the big box craziness. Drawing from the other great shop local campaigns happening in the area, we decided to try and
get the other small local businesses involved.

Once we got the ball rolling, we were so happy to get a lot of support from the shop local community advocates such as Oakland Unwrapped, Oakland Grown, OMLF (Oakland Merchants Leadership Forum) to get the word out. We were happy to get a generous donation of website and logo design from Nicole Neditch of Objet d'art and marketing sponsorship for the event from the EastBay Express and Yelp and yourselves.

We wanted people to wear plaid on this day because the connotation of plaid is playful and we think that November 27th should be a relaxing and enjoyable day, not frenzied and potentially hazardous. This is a fun way for people to be able to show their support for local business and in turn have the shop owners thank their customers.

OB: It's an east bay event... so which cities do you include in this event?

Kerri: This was all a grassroots effort, but we tried to reach out to as many businesses as we could, mostly drawing from our own connections to other local businesses and using the resources of the above mentioned agencies.  This year the participating businesses are centered around Oakland and Berkeley, but we do have shops from Emeryville, Richmond and Danville included on the online list.

OB: Are you expanding into a "shop local" advocacy body?

Kerri: I am excited to see how it goes on Friday and I would like to continue to work closely with the other year round shop local campaigns to create a larger, more expansive version of Plaid Friday for next year.  There are already ideas to expand to include more of the Bay Area and make it an ongoing event for consecutive Friday's during the holiday shopping season.

Find a participating local business at plaidfriday.com/

Full disclosure: the OakBook is one of the media sponsors of Plaid Friday.