There’s an updated version of this blog post! Read it here.
We’ve had quite a few people reach out and (basically) say, screw Etsy, let’s build an artist-owned cooperative marketplace! Don’t get me wrong, that would be utterly, absolutely amazing.
But it’s complicated.
We love the idea. It needs time, however. It needs thought. It needs a lot of answers to a lot of questions – things like – do we build it from scratch, or do we work with someone who has an existing project? There are several cooperative marketplaces in the works right now. Check out guild.art, makepostsell.com, and rain.coop, and drumroll please… the frigging founder of goimagine.com plans to convert goimagine into a coop.
The biggest barrier to building a coop isn’t the tech. It’s figuring out how to actually bring the buyers to it, once it is built. How to even make it happen in a way that it can succeed. New business ventures need to be laser-focused on a specific customer demographic, otherwise they fail. We’re a huge group of sellers that make things for a wide variety of customer demographics.
Having a seller-owned coop marketplace would be a dream. And therefore, it would be a nightmare for it to be built (or built up) by the blood, sweat and tears of all the amazing people in our community only to have it fail.
So that’s a step we can only take when we are completely ready.
In the meantime, you can join our Discord server and #sign-up-to-help to participate in the discussion about it.
Stay tuned!
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.