Imagine you're an artisan. Instead of sitting in front of a computer, your time is spent doing other things: Designing, Measuring, Sawing, Welding, Drilling, Cutting, and Hacking. (Not the tech kind.) If you were a wood, metal or glass worker in today's Internet world, how would you distribute your goods? How would you sell your products?
You'd get online. You'd pay someone to create a website for you. You'd try to get the word out through social media. But, again, you're not at a computer. You can't even keep one in your shop because there's too much dust. Without someone to distribute your work, you'd be torn between creating and selling.
This is the world Michael Salguero, the co-founder and CEO of CustomMade.com thinks about every day. Aside from having a fantastically SEO-friendly brand, he and his team of 12 full-time employees also have something really special: An online marketplace where artisans of this variety can display their wares, get found and actually convert sales.
When Salguero and his partner, Seth Rosen, purchased the site, it was already hosting the work of 350 New England-based woodworkers. The original owner was a Maine-based cabinet maker who couldn't maintain the site well enough to catapult it into the information age. There was no way for subscribers to even update their contact information on the site without Emailing him.
"Seth and I were always big believers in custom goods," said Salguero. "We were both working in real estate at the time and we were both really into buying custom things like dress shirts and suits. I had a custom T-shirt screen printing company (on the side). In 2008, Seth was looking for a custom piece of furniture and kept coming across this site called CustomMade.com. We realized this is a $15B industry and it quickly became an acquisition target for us."
By October of 2008, Salguero and Rosen had raised $500K in capital from friends and family, which they used half of to purchase the site at the beginning of 2009. They've been frantically adding artisans to the site, expanding it to include metal and glass workers, all of whom may subscriptions to be listed on the site. As a result, CustomMade is already solvent.
The next move was to totally revamp the site, introducing a content management system (CMS) where the artisans could update their own pages on the site in much the same way you might customize your Facebook page, and bringing the design, layout and search-ability of the site into the 21st Century. CustomMade was originally revamped after they bought it, but they re-launched it last week with look and feel that's even more user-friendly.
According to Salguero, many people don't realize that custom furniture is available for the same prices they can find at big, cookie cutter retail stores like IKEA. He says there's a massive friction in the custom space, and CustomMade can ease that friction by making it easy for shoppers to find exactly what they want and even have input in what the final product looks like.
This last point is something that sets CustomMade apart from other sites bent on distributing the wares of creative-types, like Art.sy and Et.sy.
"Et.sy is for handcrafted items. Someone knits a scarf. They post it. You buy it. It's a very product-oriented space. CustomMade is a service, not a product. You're not buying the coffee table you see on our site. You're buying the service of having that coffee table made however you want it."
This personalized approach has been really appealing to artisans; there are now over 1,300 woodworkers showcasing wares on the site. It's also something consumers like; over 1M people are already visiting the site each year.
"We believe that retail in general is moving towards everything being customized," said Rosen. "The paradigm is shifting. When we were in grade school, having a sweatshirt that said 'GAP' in big letters was cool. Now, people want to customize things themselves.
"Eventually, we want to be the Amazon of custom made goods. We'd like to see everyone's search for custom goods start at CustomMade.com."
That's a lofty goal, but if CustomMade keeps expanding and driving traffic, it certainly doesn't appear impossibile. Afterall, there's a sea of creative people out there both interested in the buying and selling of custom goods. With the rise of social media and other playing field-leveling Internet creations like CustomMade, middle men are evaporating.
In theory, it could be just as affordable to buy much more than custom tables and bookshelves at a competitive price before consumers even realize it.
