As local retail recovers from Covid-19 pandemic restrictions and shoppers return to more traditional retail channels, the team at Built Oregon is ending its online marketplace April 15.
The Built Marketplace launched in 2020 in response to the onset of the pandemic and stay-at-home orders. The group put the site together to help small consumer products companies make the transition to online shopping. At the time, the group said many of the entrepreneurs they worked with needed help developing e-commerce.
“We saw an opportunity to help so we took it,” said Mitch Daugherty, co-founder and director of Built Oregon, in a written statement.
For the 2020 holiday shopping season the site drove $100,000 in sales to different companies. However, a rebooted site launched in 2021 saw a big dip in use. At the same time, shoppers were able to return to stores and now the group doesn’t want to draw sales away from local retailers.
“(The Marketplace) was very much designed as a terminal, stopgap solution that we fully intended to continually reassess on an ongoing basis,” Daugherty said. “Based on those ongoing assessments, we are shuttering the Marketplace to avoid doing more harm than good.”
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.
