The Long Haud #1 | Fourteen makers, and the part I can't do

Fourteen makers have a shop open on The Haud this morning. I counted them by hand before sitting down to write this, which tells you roughly what size of business we are talking about.

The site went live in June. I spent most of the year before that building it, and building is the part I am good at, or at least the part where the effort and the result are related to each other. If the postage is calculating wrong, I can sit down and make it right. If the photographs are cropping badly on a phone, that is a bad evening and then it is fixed. Every problem I could see from where I was sitting was a problem I could solve on my own.

I THOUGHT THE SHOP WAS THE HARD PART

It is not. The shop is the part that comes with instructions.

Here is the hard part. A maker and I have a call, twenty-five minutes, and every single one of them gets one before they are accepted, because the curation is the actual product and I am not prepared to do it off a form. The call goes well. They say yes. I send everything over. And then the shop has to be opened by them, and opening it means photographs of the work, weights and measurements so the postage will calculate, prices they are willing to see in public, and a paragraph about themselves that most makers would rather have a tooth out than write.

Every one of those is a small ask. Together they are an afternoon, and an afternoon is precisely what somebody with a workshop and a waiting list does not have. So the shop sits there, built, three quarters full, not open. Several of them have been sitting like that for weeks.

WHAT I HAVE TRIED

Taking the work off them, mostly. A maker can talk me through their pieces and have most of a shop written out of the conversation, and where that does not suit, I will sit and build the thing myself from their photographs and their own website. I have written the reminders. I have offered to come and do it at their kitchen table.

None of that touches the real obstacle, which is that a shop with somebody's name on it cannot go live until that person has looked at it and said yes. Nor should it. The whole promise here is that the maker is somebody you can read about, and a person who has not read their own page is not that. So the last step belongs to them, and the last step is where everything stops.

WHAT I GOT WRONG

I treated the yes as the finish line.

In my head the sequence went: find good makers, get them to agree, open the shops. The agreeing was the bit I was nervous about, because it meant asking people to trust something that did not exist yet, and asking them to be among the first. It turned out to be the easy half. People have been extraordinarily generous about it. What I had not costed was the distance between somebody meaning yes and somebody having done it, and that distance has nothing to do with persuasion. It is a question of whether anyone has a free afternoon.

The tidy version of this is that joining is a conversion problem and I am working on it. The true version is that I built a machine and cannot make anybody use it, and that I did not see it coming because I had never run anything before where the last step was not mine.

THE THING I CANNOT DECIDE

There are two ways out and I change my mind about them by the day.

The first is to go slower and do more of it myself. Build every shop by hand, one at a time, until each maker has nothing left to do but read it and nod. It works. I have done it. It also does not scale past one of me, and I can see exactly what that business looks like in two years: a growth rate that is really just my own calendar with a company built around it.

The second is to take more makers on and accept that a proportion of them will never open. Get the numbers up and let the willing ones come through. That is what a marketplace normally does, and the reason I keep flinching from it is that somebody who signs up and then sits there unopened has had a slightly bad experience of me, and I have twenty-five minutes of my own promises invested in every one of them.

I have not decided. I notice that I am spending the time I could use to decide on building yet another tool to make the afternoon shorter, which is the same instinct that got me here: when the problem is other people, go and fix something mechanical instead.

Before this I worked at Watts & Co, which has been making ecclesiastical embroideries by hand in West London since 1874. I went in thinking the difficulty of a craft business would be the craft. It is not the craft. It is all the ordinary things stacked around the craft, and every one of them needs a person to have twenty minutes.

There is a shop I could publish from this desk in about four seconds. It is finished. Everything is in it. I am not going to, because it is not mine to publish. So I will send another email this week, and then I will wait for somebody else to press the button.