Supermarket is an innovative website which allows independent designers to sell their wares. Curated by its founders, it has a wide range of objects, but not so wide that it overwhelms you. It's a fantastic venue for designers to put their work up for sale online without dealing with headaches like coding a website or setting up a merchant account. www.supermarkethq.com



Ryan, you have a webstore, Elsewares, which came before Supermarket. Tell me a little about how that got started.

Ryan: I had a previous life as a documentary filmmaker, and at the tail end of a PBS project I realized that I enjoyed making the film's web site as much as, maybe more than, the process of making the film. Around the same time, in 2003, a friend of mine came up with an agitprop product called Bush Cards, and I helped him build an online store that was extremely successful. I wanted to repeat that experience, so I turned to other products that I thought the world should know about, and - thats how Elsewares started.

Randy, what is your background?

Randy: In design, as a graphic designer. I started working with Ryan through Elsewares, and it really just evolved. We committed to the idea of Supermarket, and decided to turn it into something.

So what made you want to expand into new online territory and create Supermarket?

Ryan: Supermarket came out of what Elsewares wasn't. Elsewares is a traditional online retailer: it holds stock, carries inventory and we ship all the products. There's always been a limit to how large it could get, and how large we wanted it to get, and that in turn has always limited the number of designers and great products we could work with.



How do you curate the designers on Supermarket?

Ryan: What we aim to do, by curating the collection, is not create something that's exclusive, but rather the inverse - create a site, a platform which attracts as much good work as possible. We find that good work attracts good work, so we just try to follow this vein of good design, and there are things which naturally fit into that.

Randy: It's very intuitive, kind of a gut reaction - it's what would you buy yourself? Can I be a fan of this product?

Ryan: If there is any criteria it's, "Would I buy this, and tell my friends about it?"

Randy: It's a rare occasion when we have to ask each other, "Do you think this fits?"

Do you have any loose figures about how many designers there are on the site, and how many products?

Ryan: The last time we published figures it was several hundred designers, and more then 6000 products. But it's not quantity, its quality - we want people to have a sense that they can always go to Supermarket, see and find cool stuff, and not be overwhelmed.

It's interesting when compared to Etsy, which has blown up into this massive thing. How do you feel the two sites relate?

Ryan: Etsy has obviously tapped into a big handmade thing. There's some overlap between designers that sell at Supermarket and Etsy, but beyond that we're different web sites offering different experiences, which works for us.

What kind of traffic do you get, and how have you built it?

Randy: We started with what was happening organically, and tried to amplify it. Based on the reputations, and the visibility of many of the designers selling on the site, we were already generating a lot of traffic. Everyone thats selling gets to benefit from the traffic funneling in, so some of the less popular designers, or people who don't have the name recognition, get to benefit from those who do.

We started to see two things happening simultaneously: one was that some mainstream blogs would have things to say often about specific products or designers, and occasional about the site at large, and at the same time, very personal blogs, where people journal about their personal shopping experience or day, were writing about their experience on Supermarket. We started looking at both those responses, and reaching out to people where the site, or specific products and designers represented on the site, seemed like a good match. Traffic has been pretty organic. Its not as though were sending "please blog us!" emails. We were just forming relationships.

Ryan: Often it starts with a blog mentioning us, and we'll take a moment to reach out and thank them. Blogs of all kinds are really important, not just the superstar ones. We also have our newsletter which goes out every two weeks, and we try to keep it, like the site, regular and bite sized. Its not trying to stop your other train of thought to digest it, but rather act as an introduction to get to the site and check it out. Its hard to strike that right tone between interruption and offer, and keep someone interested without pestering them.



One thing that you have that's really useful is the collective blog, could you talk a little more about that?

Ryan: We started blogging about cool products, before Supermarket was ready to go. I couldn't just sit around and hold it in till we were ready. It was a way to draw attention, and get people to join the site, but also to share information, and have a continual conversation with our customers, without always being in sales mode.

The way it works on Supermarket is that designers can actually add to the blog. Sometimes its a post about their new product, and sometimes they'll be blogging about other things which are tangentially related - like a new store, or show they're in, and thats great.

Are there any new projects on the back-burner or new branches? Where do you see the Supermarket heading?

Ryan: Well now that we're a year in, we see these things within Supermarket where we've only touched upon the potential. There's no small number of things we have to work on. We do have some other things on the burner, that we think might be graceful outgrowths of Supermarket - but they aren't ready yet.

Randy: I think one of the other things, other then the software development per se, is the idea that we can help designers to figure out how to do the stuff were doing. The blog being there, shows the importance of taking a good photograph, announcing new products in multiple venues, writing a good description - all things that work to the designers benefit. And just on a very human level, allows us to reach out to designers and help them think of things they might not have. We can reach out to designers and say: hey maybe you want to try this, maybe you want to reorganize your store this way, have you considered using these tags, heres some links to other photographs of products like yours. We're doing this in a very manual way, but we've definitely touched on ideas on how to take our business insight if you will, or marketing insight, and hand it over to people as often as possible.

Ryan: Exactly, and some of these are things that designers might not spend their time thinking about, because they think its some business problem, that you can just make good products and surely they'll sell. We're excited to share the information we have, and highlight examples of things being done well by other sellers, so that people can learn, and not just do what they're already doing, but grow their business.

One of the things thats really interesting about Supermarket is that its looking at the bigger picture, its about creating a system rather then a product or webstore - could you talk about this?

Randy: Supermarket really is a system. Your designing this set of tools for people to use, thats not isolated in a storefront product , but exists in this space where people are already comfortable. Its a bridge between the business world and the personal. No one wants to deal with software, they just want to sell the stuff online. No one wants to deal with a merchant account, they just want to get paid. No one wants to have to install the blog, they just want to express themselves. There are a whole bunch of designers, with a lot of ambition, who have developed their skills in this we can do anything moment, where all the boundaries are blurring, that the assumption is that they can do everything. Supermarket helps facilitate that.



I think it's a big design challenge, for Supermarket, that it has to be a store which fits all different types of products - in some ways it really has to recede. How did this affect the design of the site?

Randy: We definitely approached that when designing the experience of using the site. Its important that when you go to the site you see your screen filled up with other people's work, we just create the context.

Ryan: We've also been impressed by how much people appreciate not just the product but the person, the designer, and the story behind what's for sale.

What do you consider your biggest success so far?

Ryan: It's satisfying to have something that people appreciate, that gets them talking, and which leads to more people seeking us out.

Randy: Interestingly, its funny: if you google Supermarket, we're the first thing that comes up - above any national food chain. It wasn't like we sat down and tried to make this happen, it happened organically, the pieces just fell into place.

What advice do you have for creative entrepreneurs?

Randy: It's important to break things down into really small pieces. The idea of Supermarket is pretty lofty and open, you've got all these types of people and product, and we got the most traction and tangible results, when we focused on one or two things for a period of time, accomplished them, and then focused on one or two other things.

Ryan: I also think it's important to be authentic. Don't be tempted to "stage manage" your business to look like anyone else's. Be yourself, speak in your own voice, and just use the tools at your disposal to get your message and your products out there. Forget the press release.