Most shops ask you what you are looking for.
We think that is the wrong question, or at least the second one. The better question is what you want to be true about the thing you buy.
By purpose
Sustainable. Ethical. Women-led. Upcycled. B Corp.
These are not badges we hand out. They are how you filter, which means they have to be accurate or the whole thing is decoration. A maker is women-led or is not. A product is upcycled or is not. We check, and where we cannot verify something we do not claim it.
The women-led filter is worth dwelling on, because it is not really a marketing category. It is a correction. Independent making has always been disproportionately women. Independent funding has disproportionately not been. Making that visible as a way to shop is a small thing that costs us nothing and changes where money goes.
The others work the same way. Upcycled means the material had a previous life. Ethical means we have asked about the supply chain and had an answer. If a maker cannot evidence something, the filter does not apply to them, and they are not penalised for it. They simply appear under the things that are true.
By place
Every maker is somewhere.
A ceramicist in Stoke. A leather workshop in Florence. A boutique on a high street in Marlow that has been choosing well for eleven years.
Shopping by location is not nostalgia and it is not a carbon calculation, though it sometimes helps with both. It is the difference between an anonymous object and one you know something about. It is also the only filter that reliably surprises people, because most of us have no real idea what is being made twenty miles away.
There is a particular pleasure in finding that the thing you have been looking for has been made, all along, in a town you drive through.
By boutique
Some of the best curation in the world is being done by people who run physical shops.
They have spent years learning what their customers respond to, and buying accordingly, with their own money, at risk. That judgment is a genuine skill and online it is almost entirely invisible. A shop's selection is itself a product, assembled slowly by somebody with an eye.
We think you should be able to shop that selection as a selection, and to know whose eye you are borrowing. Not a category. A person, and the taste they have built.
Putting them together
None of these ideas are new on their own.
What is new is being able to combine them. Women-led ceramicists within thirty miles of you. A particular boutique's homeware, filtered to upcycled only. Ethical fashion from makers in one city.
That only works if every product has been read, understood and tagged properly. Which is the unglamorous half of this, and a subject for another day.
The filters are the visible part. The work is underneath.
