Haley Lena
hlena@coloradocommunitymedia.com

When local businesses started to close down due to the pandemic, University of Denver student John-Paul Evans wanted to help. Three years later, Evans, who grew up in Parker, launched harvestersa website that connects shoppers to their local businesses.

While talking with an owner of a running shoe store, Evans learned that many business closures were influenced by the pandemic, but the problem started years before COVID-19.

“The issue kind of started back around 2012, 2013 when online shopping kind of took off and especially online shopping with large retailers,” said Evans.

As Evans saw that online shopping made shopping too convenient of an option compared to shopping at local businesses, he began to think of a way to make it more convenient to shop locally online and make it an easy process.

For over a year, Evans tried to make different apps and played around with websites. Through Harvester, it created a marketplace that allows shoppers to search and browse products directly from local shops.

Harvester launched in February and already has 70,000 stores on the site for shoppers across the US

“All the stores that are currently listed on Harvester are ones that already