Shop by Location is now live. Browse the marketplace by where things are actually made.
We have added a new way to browse: by where a brand is. Not a filter we invented for the sake of having one, but the one we kept wanting ourselves.
What it does
Every brand on Brix + Bailey 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. Until now you could find them by category or by purpose. You could not find them by place.
Now you can. British brands, European, Baltic, American, Canadian, Australian and Asian.
Why bother
Shopping by location is not nostalgia, and it is not a carbon calculation, though it occasionally 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. Most of us have very little idea what is being made twenty miles away, and there is a particular pleasure in discovering that the thing you have been hunting for has been made, all along, in a town you drive through.
Boutiques
The part of this we are most interested in is the shops.
Independent boutique owners have spent years learning what their customers respond to and buying accordingly, with their own money, at risk. That judgment is a real skill and online it is almost completely invisible. A shop's selection is itself a product, assembled slowly by somebody with an eye, and we think you should be able to shop it as a selection rather than as a category.
Shops you can visit in person.
What it took
The filters are the visible part. Underneath, every product has to be read, understood and tagged properly, which is the unglamorous half of this and a subject for another day.
We add brands every week and each one is read personally. If you run an independent brand or a boutique, start with how we choose brands.
