Creative Marketing

Looking to take part in Singapore's national pastime of shopping, but bored of brand-name stores? Then check out the nine-month-old Market of Artists and Designers, better known as MAAD, maad.sg. Held on the first weekend of every month at the Red Dot Design Museum on Maxwell Road, this is not your usual rummage sale of bad macramé and lopsided pottery. Instead, MAAD is an outdoor bazaar that stresses cutting-edge work from budding fashion designers, graphic artists, painters, jewelry makers, housewares makers and product designers. Before they go on sale, the items need the tick of approval from a panel of curators that currently includes Edward Tonino, a senior designer with electronics manufacturer Philips, and Ken Koo, president of the Asian chapter of the Red Dot Design Awards—one of the design world's most sought-after honors.

Expect to find everything from graphic skins for your iPod and customized sneakers to original artwork and necklaces and belts made out of knitted yarn. There are colorful patchwork bags, stuffed animals stitched together from discarded clothes, silhouette brooches fashioned out of black plastic and slippers decorated with animé-like cartoons. Look out also for demonstrations from the likes of graffiti artists and batik makers.

MAAD's wallet-friendly prices attract a healthy crowd of tourists and locals, but it aims to be more than just a fun diversion for the mall-weary. It also wants to cultivate Singapore's visual-arts scene. "We call ourselves the MAADsters," says main organizer Shannon Ong. "It's a way for like-minded people to mingle." Ong hopes that the market can start to include solo exhibitions for promising young artists. "For a lot of artists in Singapore there's no way for them to prove themselves to the galleries," she says. "So we want MAAD to be like a first stop."