The Built Oregon online marketplace is back this holiday season — well, actually, it never left from last year — but, it’s been redesigned and is ready for the 2021 holiday shopping season.
Built Oregon is a nonprofit that supports consumer product companies across the state. It offers programming and mentorship to connect small businesses with executives and others from the large consumer products companies in the state. It also has an accelerator through a partnership with the Portland Incubator Experiment.
Last year as the Covid-19 pandemic began to take hold, Built Oregon worked to help the state’s consumer product companies navigate an upended economy. The group had been planning a traditional retail location, likely in downtown Portland, to showcase products and companies from around the state.
“Something like that depends on tourism and retail (shoppers),” said Built co-founder Mitch Daugherty of those brick and mortar plans. “Covid killed that idea.”
Instead the group doubled down with an online store. It quickly got a Built Oregon Marketplace online, which was no simple feat. The site is a multi-vendor marketplace and the technology connecting hundreds of different vendors through one consumer site could be clunky.
This year, with the help of new board member Katharine Reinhold, who is director of innovation at sportswear company Adidas, the marketplace was redesigned. It is now more user-friendly and allows the more than 400 sellers to be “discovered” by shoppers.
It had been difficult to see all of the products available from the hundreds of sellers but now there are browsing categories, themes and recommendations.
“We would love for this to be a destination place for holiday shopping,” said Reinhold. “We know people are struggling with supply chains and these gifts are made here in Oregon, that is the criteria for being on the site. We hope it helps consumers and sellers.”
Last year, the site had 70,000 visitors with about 70% around the holidays. It drove $105,000 in sales to the small businesses who were connected to consumers through the site.
Currently, there are 405 sellers and 2,800 products listed across a variety of consumer product categories. Items range from food and beverage to home goods and apparel.
“The goal of this is awareness for these companies,” said Daugherty. “Some of our more established (sellers) with e-commerce were stoked because 90% of the orders from our marketplace were new customers. Whoever was feeding people to our site, (those shoppers) were finding these products and had never found these products before.”
The group is working with other organizations like Travel Oregon and Business Oregon to drive traffic to the site.
“We are hoping for a repeat performance of last year but with higher sales now that it’s a little more discoverable and finding inspiration in the great products that are made here,” said Reinhold. “Not everything needs to go through Amazon.”
