A question we keep turning over, and we would like to know what you think.
We talk to independent brands every week. They are making extraordinary things, and a striking number of them have the same problem, which is that almost nobody knows they exist.
A ceramicist in Devon makes tableware good enough for a museum. A jewellery designer in New York cuts pieces that would stop you in the street. Neither can outspend anyone, and neither started their business because they wanted to become good at paid search.
The bit we find tricky
Building a website is one thing, and we made a fair number of mistakes with our early attempts. Then comes search, social, advertising, email, and the twenty other things that stand between making something and selling it.
The brands we work with mostly tell us they would rather be making. Which seems reasonable, given that is the skill they spent years acquiring.
Where we might be wrong
Direct-to-consumer plainly works for some brands. The ones with the appetite for it, the time, and usually somebody whose whole job is the marketing. We are not arguing that nobody should try.
But what we keep seeing is talented people working in isolation, found by customers almost entirely by accident, if at all.
What a marketplace actually does
It is not a shopfront. A brand with a website already has one of those, on page eleven of a search nobody performs.
What it does is bring people who came looking. Someone arrives for a candle and leaves having found a ceramicist from the same county. That serendipity is the product, and no individual brand can manufacture it alone.
The brands we work with tell us they feel less alone as part of something bigger. We would like to think that is true and not simply politeness.
Our question to you
So: is this a real problem, or one we have talked ourselves into because we happen to sell the solution?
If you run an independent brand, we would like to know what discovery has actually been like for you. And if you shop this way, we would like to know how you find the brands you end up loving.
Tell us below, or drop us a line. No agenda beyond genuine curiosity.
If you would rather see the answer than discuss it, have a browse through every brand we carry.
