Since Maker’s Row launched as a B2B matchmaker for designers and suppliers, it’s helped over 80,000 businesses make over 1.5 million products here in the United States. Today the company launched an e-commerce site to make it easier to find and buy anything from furniture to apparel that’s designed and made in America.
Maker’s Row founders Matthew Burnett and Tanya Menendez founded the company with the mission of teaching independent designers how to scale up their businesses. “We were helping people create these products, but we weren’t able to show the end results,” Burnett says. “We needed to show that the platform works and what’s possible.” It’s about bringing the domestic economy full circle: design products stateside, manufacture them locally, and find a retail channel.
The site is organized into three main categories: furniture, apparel, and playhouse—a hodgepodge of housewares, games, and artwork. There are over 80 brands and nearly 500 products in the site’s inaugural roster. Each of the product pages tells a backstory about the designers along with the standard item description, dimensions, and pricing.
You can purchase a nifty storage-bench hybrid from the Brooklyn design studio Thing Industries; a backpack from the Florida-based Yield; or a lamp from the L.A. brand Feltmark.
Another goal of Burnett and Menendez’s e-commerce site is to show the wealth and uniqueness of American design. “‘Made in Detroit’ is different from ‘Made in L.A.’ or ‘Made in Chicago’,” Burnett says. “It’s interesting to reflect upon what’s happening across the county and in all of its pockets. You can ‘see’ what the design community looks like.”
[All Photos: via Maker’s Row]
