Main Street Mavericks Business Spotlight: Tomi Mart

Tomi Mart — Bend’s first Asian market, owned by Natasha Dempsey and Jessi Scott — is a feast for the eyes and taste buds. Stocked with treats, snacks, traditional favorites, and a ramen wall, the marketplace is a love letter to Asian culture and community (which are two important aspects of Dempsey and Scott’s business plan).

We ventured over to Tomi Mart to meet with Dempsey and talk business. (But we also couldn’t help but load up on goodies before we left, too.) Come meet the power behind this new Bend small business.

Q&A With Tomi Mart

Tell us about yourself and your small business.

Hi, I’m Natasha Dempsey, and I am the co-owner of Tomi Mart, Ben’s Asian Market. My other half is Jessica Scott, but she isn’t here today. We launched the Tomi Mart brand in October of 2022, and we opened our doors to the public in June of this year. We’ve been open for almost three months now, and we’ve had an amazing following and support from our community. Jessica was born and raised in Bend, and I’ve been in Bend since ’99.

So, we are both true Bend locals. It’s really important to us to bring an Asian market to our community. I’m half Korean, and Jessica’s partner is part Japanese. So we have both just grown up in, or been around, very Asian culturally focused homes. Jesse has also spent time living abroad in China and Japan, and so we’ve just missed having Asian food in our communities.

It’s a way for us to be able to share our culture and traditions with our family members. We both have small kids, and we don’t have an Asian market here in Bend, so it was also a way for us to give back to the community and bring this really culturally diverse market into our small town here in Bend.

Tell us more about Tomi Mart!

We’re a pretty small Asian market. We have about 1,500 square feet here. We try to have a wide range of offerings. We have candies, snacks, we have ramen. We have lots of ingredients, from fish sauce to various types of soy sauce and curry paste.

We recently started offering fresh produce as well as refrigerated and frozen items, too.

What is your top piece of advice for small business owners just starting out?

I think Jessi and I both agree that one of the biggest pieces of support and mentorship that we’ve received has been through the SPDC, which is a small business development center that is housed at our local community college here. Our business advisor has been with us for over a year and a half, and we met with her weekly until we launched this business physically in this shop.

And so she has just been a tremendous supporter and a wealth of knowledge for two of us gals who are new-time entrepreneurs.

Secondly, we’ve used SCORE, which is another type of business advising and mentorship program that is also within our community. So we’ve really tapped into utilizing these free services to get us started out on the right foot and have a successful business.

What is the best part of being a small business owner?

I think one of the best parts is being able to be a mom and a wife and a friend and a business partner, and all of the things wrapped up together come to a place that I love to work at. It doesn’t feel like work. There’s a huge passion and a heart component that’s been put into this business.

So, to be able to work hours that are flexible enough to be able to pick my kids up from school and make dinner with my family at night is super important. It is one of the highlights of being a small business owner.

Tell us your favorite thing about your business.

One of the favorite things that I love about showing up here is when a customer comes in, and they have a laundry list of Asian food items that they are looking for, and we are just checking off every single one of those items and getting them into their basket — or we have varieties of those items. That feels really good. It fills my heart.

It honestly fills my cup when I can help folks find those super specific or rare items or items that they’ve been having to travel over to Portland to get, and we can find them right at this store.

Tell us a little bit more about your mission and vision for Tomi Mart?

So another little thing about Tomi Mart is that we have our four C’s, our mission, and the values behind this market.

Those four C’s stand for community, collaboration, culture, and celebration.

When we think of our four C’s, we like that to show up when you’re walking into this space, creating a welcoming place that feels like a home. Your second home is supporting other community members, collaborating with other Asian women, and Asian-owned women-owned businesses. We have a lot of specialty products that we bring in here, such as small-batch art, artisanally made by Asian-owned ventures, or women-owned.

So we really want to support and bring up those other small businesses just like our own here.

Where do you source your items?

We do have a few big distributors, but we run into challenges. A lot of these distributors don’t want to come from Portland to Bend. It’s a three-hour trek across the mountain. It’s not a lot of times worthwhile for them to bring a big semi over here, drop off a load of food, and not pick anything up over in central Oregon to take back.

So we contract with a couple of different third-party trucking companies to do that for them. Expand our offerings here and get Korean vendors out of Seattle and Southeast Asian vendors in Washington or outside of the Portland area. We also have a lot of really tiny, small distributors of these specialty items. These might be mom-and-pop shops, women-owned, veteran-owned, and Asian-owned businesses that we find on a specialty wholesale website. We source them from a website, and they get directly shipped to us.

However, we follow a lot of other Asian-owned businesses, so the community has opened up a lot of other options. Oh, this gal is making bubble tea; these folks over here are making Asian-inspired electrolyte beverage replacements. So, we have been opened up to a really huge community of all of these amazing makers, and they’re always Asian-owned, plus a whole bunch of other really fun things that we like to highlight.

Tell us about your experience with crowdfunding.

Part of this business was funded by a crowdfunding effort. Back in May of 2023, we did a huge event called the Tomi Mart Takeover, and it was a kickoff event to launch our online Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign.

We were able to raise over $20,000 from our community, who just really showed up and believed in us, the mission, and the reason why we wanted to bring this market to town.

And that night, we did our first-ever ramen eating contest, which was incredibly successful. We did a silent auction and had raffles. We had dancers, demonstrations, and food trucks, and it was a really fun event. And we had over 600 people show up for that event. And it just really brings back to that four C’s, that community piece, that want to share culture piece that is so strongly represented in this market.

Do you have a favorite snack here?

Oh, that is going to be so hard. Let’s see here. Okay, my favorite sweet snack is this Sakura Asian yogurt drink flavored gummy, stringy gummy. I grew up on the classic Asian yogurt drink.

It comes in a little plastic bottle with a red foil lid. You can have it refrigerated, or we would have it frozen in the summer, and you rip off the top of it, and you just drink it.

And then my favorite savory, salty snack has got to be any variety of shrimp chips.

What sets you apart from other Asian markets?

We’re just what we like to call a mom-and-ma shop.

We’re both mothers. So it’s a mom-and-ma shop here. When you walk in here, it won’t be like you’re going to HMR or Ujimaya. It is so much smaller. We just don’t have the capacity to cook fresh meat and seafood or roast ducks and things like that or chickens. This is our tiny piece of being able to bring some of those bigger stores here into our community.

There’s going to be a lot of similarities, though. You’re going to come in here and probably see your favorite Asian snack. You’re probably going to be able to get that Thai fish sauce that you were looking for or the Tik Tok noodles that are popular right now.

But I know when I come in here and when I go into those other markets, I get a feeling of nostalgia. It’s like a whole body thing that comes over me — this feeling of home. And I get that when I walk in here. So I really try to hope that my customers feel that our customers feel that as well.

Where do you envision Tomi Mart five years from now?

In five years? We even have so many goals and aspirations happening right now that we can’t wait to get out and show our customers!

We’re going to be starting a meal of the month program. So you can come in here and get everything you need to make a certain type of dish. It’s going to have a recipe card, and it’ll tell you the origin of where it came from and its significance. If it’s a special meal for a holiday or if it’s seasonal, there are just so many different things that we hope to do. It’s it’s endless. In five years, we’ll be here, I’m sure, if not here or in a bigger space.

But we will be here. This is a kind of a family, lifelong business for us.