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

There are fourteen makers with a shop open on The Haud as I write this, which is a small number to be starting a diary with, but it seemed only fair to begin by saying how big (or how small) the whole thing actually is.

The site went live in June, after most of a year spent building it, and I'll admit the building turned out to be the part I was comfortable with. Whenever something went wrong, like the postage calculating strangely or photographs cropping badly on a phone, I could sit down that evening and put it right myself, and there is something very reassuring about a problem you can fix on your own.

THE SHOP WAS NEVER THE HARD PART

Every maker has a twenty-five minute call with me before they join, because choosing the makers is really the whole point of The Haud and I didn't want to do that from a form. I love those calls, and nearly everyone I speak to says yes, which still delights me every time.

What happens next is where it slows down. Once a maker has said yes, they need to fill their shop, which means photographing their work, weighing and measuring everything so the postage works, deciding on prices, and writing a few lines about themselves (which almost nobody enjoys doing, and I completely understand why). None of it is difficult on its own, but it all adds up to an afternoon, and most makers I know are running a workshop and a list of orders and simply don't have a spare afternoon, so a few shops have been sitting almost finished for weeks.

WHAT I'VE BEEN TRYING

Mostly I've been trying to take as much of it off their hands as I can. A maker can talk me through their pieces on a call and I'll write most of the shop from what they tell me, or if that doesn't suit them, I'll build it from their photographs and their own website and send it over for them to look at, with a gentle reminder or two along the way.

The one thing I can't do for them is the final check, and I wouldn't want to. A shop with a maker's name on it shouldn't go live until they've read it and are happy with what it says about them, because the whole idea of The Haud is that you know exactly who made the piece you're buying. So that last step has to be theirs, and it's also, understandably, where most of the waiting happens.

WHAT I GOT WRONG

I had assumed that once a maker said yes, the difficult bit was over. I was far more nervous about asking people to join something that didn't exist yet, and I expected that to be the hard conversation, but people have been incredibly generous about it. What I hadn't really thought about was the gap between someone agreeing to join and someone having the time to finish their shop, and that isn't something I can persuade anyone across, because it's really about time, which I can't give them.

I've never run anything before where the last step belonged to somebody else, so it simply didn't occur to me that this is where things would slow down.

THE DECISION I HAVEN'T MADE YET

I can see two ways forward and I change my mind about them most weeks. The first is to go more slowly and do even more of the work myself, building each shop completely so that all a maker has to do is read it and say yes. I know that works, because I've done it, but it means The Haud can only grow as fast as I can work, which isn't very fast.

The second is to welcome more makers and accept that some of them will never get round to opening. That's how most marketplaces grow, and I understand why, but I find it hard, because I've made each of those makers promises on our calls and I'd hate for anyone's first experience of The Haud to be a shop that never opened.

I haven't decided yet, and I've noticed that while I think it over I keep building new tools to make that afternoon shorter, probably because that's the kind of problem I know how to solve!

Before The Haud I worked at Watts & Co, who have been making ecclesiastical embroidery by hand in West London since 1874, and I went in assuming that the hard part of a craft business would be the craft itself. What I've found, there and here, is that it's all the ordinary things around the craft, and every one of them needs someone to find a bit of time.

This week I'll be sending the next round of emails, and then waiting (patiently, I hope) to hear back.