When Melissa Smith's beloved grandmother passed away in April of 2008, she was left with a broken heart and lots of medical bills to pay.

“She had dementia, and she had given away all of her money,” Melissa says.

Melissa had quit her job as marketing director at Lakewood Golf Club to become her grandmother's full-time caretaker, and after her death, she needed a source of income. To get by, she had an estate sale — her grandmother was an avid antique collector. Melissa picked out the most meaningful items to save and sold the rest.

Fortunately, Melissa had been raised around antiques and knew the value of all of the pieces.

“I've always had antiques around me and always had a love for them,” she says.

The estate sale rekindled her love for antiques, and she soon realized she could make a career out of it.

“Within another month, my friend's mom passed away, and she asked me to do the estate sale for her,” she says. “Then other friends kept calling and asking. It felt right, and I said, 'I think this is what I'm supposed to do.' Now all I do is get phone calls from people needing estate sales.”

Now, she views her job as a service to people who are grieving lost loved ones. She remembers the pain of losing her grandmother and always keeps that in mind when handling estate sales.

“When someone passes away, you're so overwhelmed with the stuff they have,” she says. “People don't think about that. So I pack up their homes and separate things for them.”

Melissa says she learned it is best to do estate sales away from the home of the person who has died. When her grandmother passed away, she just couldn't have the sale in her home, so she loaded up all of the antiques and sold them at the Daphne Antique Galleria. But transporting items back and forth was a lot of work.

She had a storage unit full of antiques at the 181 Mini-Storage in Fairhope — why not just turn it into a permanent location where people could come and shop every weekend?

“I finally asked the owner if I could set my storage unit up like a shop,” she says. “He said sure, so I did.”

So for a year, Melissa ran the Dragonfly Emporium by herself out of the storage unit. It became so popular that other people began inquiring about joining her. As she thought about it, she realized what a great idea that was — more vendors would draw more customers, and it could become something big. She started accepting other vendors in November of 2009, and the 181 Market, Fairhope's upscale flea market, was born.

“Being out there alone for a year, I kind of got lonely,” she says. “And I think you're more successful in numbers. And it didn't become a competition. The more that's out there, the better it is. Now, we have 50 shops there, and every one of them is a little different.”

After five years in business, Melissa looks back at how all of this started and can't help but think there was a bigger plan all along.

“When I was cleaning out my grandmother's house, I found a box, and it said, 'For Melissa,'” she remembers. “And inside, there were albums of Kovel's Antique Guides on everything you would ever want to know about antiques, and she had purchased a subscription for me before she died. I couldn't believe the box when I opened it. It was like she had a plan for me. It was like she had been training me my whole life for this.”