For independent brands, standing out against the big players is hard. Traditional retail channels favour established names, which leaves genuinely good independent work without a route to the customers who would love it.
Brix + Bailey exists to solve that. Hundreds of hand-picked brands, across fashion, homeware, jewellery and lifestyle, in one place customers come to specifically to find things they have not seen before.
We talk to the co-founders.
Tell us about Brix + Bailey. What makes it different?
We are a curated marketplace for independent brands: emerging designers and established independents across fashion, homeware, jewellery and lifestyle, at prices that are not silly and a quality standard we do not move on.
The problem we set out to solve is discovery. There is no shortage of brilliant independent work. There is a considerable shortage of ways for anyone to find it. That is the whole job.
What we bring to it is that we have been on the other side. We started as an independent handbag brand in 2012 and spent years learning exactly how hard it is to get in front of the right people. We are not a technology company that decided to try retail. We are retailers who built the technology because what we needed did not exist.
You can see everyone we carry in our brand directory.
Who are your customers?
People who care where their money goes. They want to know who made the thing, under what conditions, and whether the brand behind it believes anything in particular.
They span every age group, and they share a few habits. They buy less often and think harder about it. They are looking for pieces nobody else has. And a great many of them are buying gifts, because a present from a brand nobody has heard of is a considerably better present.
We reach them mostly through writing: brand stories, how things are made, what the labels on ethical products actually mean. Instagram, LinkedIn, the newsletter, and a great deal of word of mouth. Customers who find something they love here tell people, which is the only marketing that has ever really worked.
If you would rather shop by what you believe than by category, that is what Shop by Purpose is for.
What problem do you solve for the brands?
Discovery, again, from the other direction. A ceramicist in Devon can be making museum-quality tableware and still be invisible, because being good at ceramics and being good at customer acquisition are unrelated skills and only one of them is why she started.
A marketplace fixes that by being somewhere people arrive intending to find brands they have not met. Someone comes for one and leaves following three. No individual brand can manufacture that on its own.
We also take on the part that exhausts people: the search traffic, the storytelling, the email, the ten thousand small things that stand between making something and selling it. The brands get on with making. We get on with the rest.
What are you proud of?
The applications, mostly. We read every single one and there are a great many, which tells us the problem we set out to solve is a real one and not something we invented to justify the business.
More than that, the brands who tell us we have become their main route to new customers without their work having to change to suit us. That was the entire point and it is genuinely satisfying when it happens.
And the fact that customers who find one brand here reliably go on to find others. That is the marketplace doing the thing a marketplace is for.
What is next?
Two things. We are widening who can join: authors, people running courses and workshops, dealers in antiques and collectables. Different trades, the same instinct.
And we are expanding our work with bricks-and-mortar boutiques, because some of the best curation anywhere is being done by people with a shop and their own money at risk, and online it is almost entirely invisible. That seems to us an obvious thing to fix.
If you run an independent brand or a boutique, start with how we choose brands, then apply to join.
