Fancy selling through Makerhood? Come and meet us

The excitement is rising, as the basic infrastructure of the pilot Makerhood Brixton site is in place. So now we’re organising workshops to get the first sellers on board.

If you’re a local maker, artist or grower, these meetings will give you the chance to:

  • learn how the site will work and set up a test stall
  • discuss commercial and legal issues around selling online
  • give us feedback.

Details of workshops are as follows:

Date

Time

Place

Thursday 9 June

7-8.30pm

The Dogstar, 389 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton

Saturday 11 June

10-11.30am

Café Roha, 103 Acre Lane, Brixton

Tuesday 14 June

7-8.30pm

The Dogstar, 389 Coldharbour Lane, Brixton

Friday 17 June

4-5.30pm

The Poet Bar, 214-216 Railton Road, Herne Hill

Saturday 18 June

3-4.30pm

Sun and Doves, 61-63 Coldharbour Lane, Camberwell

Saturday 25 June

3-4.30pm

Café Roha, 103 Acre Lane, Brixton

For more information, see Makers’ Meetings.

If you’d like to join, please tell us:

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Another Brixton blogger on board

My name is Kim Winter, and I’ve joined Kristina, Karen and the rest of the Makerhood team (obviously your name doesn’t have to begin with K to get involved, but it may help! 😉 ).

I’m a freelance editor – I used to be managing editor of Which? magazine, and I’ve spent the last couple of years helping to launch an Indian version of Which?. I’ve lived in Brixton for nearly 25 years, and I also run the Brixton Windmill blog (the building, not the pub!).

I got involved with Makerhood because I’m currently doing a course in creative and experimental textiles at Morley College near Waterloo (my Flextiles blog records my various experiments).  I’ve been trying to sell some of my (successful) results at various local sales. While there I’ve talked to other makers and realised it can be difficult for individuals to reach local people who might be interested in buying their stuff.

So I think Makerhood is a great idea. There’s a real creative buzz around Brixton at the moment, and I’m excited about being part of it. With my journalistic background I’ll be helping with the website and blog, and interviewing and writing features on local makers. So if you’re planning to sell through Makerhood, I’ll be in touch!

Our survey is now closed!

A MASSIVE thank you to the 106 people who completed it. Your help and input is much appreciated.

We’re pouring over your thoughts, and hope to share the conclusions in a couple of weeks.

Remember that one person who completed the survey, chosen at random, will get a lovely hamper from CornerCopia. We are going to pull the winning name out of a (metaphorical) hat later this week and we will announce the winner on Friday.

Keeping fingers and toes crossed for you!

Come join us: volunteering opportunities

As we are are working towards pilot launch in the coming weeks we are looking for more volunteers to get involved in the project. So if you share our passion for local goods and supporting makers in South London and would like to help, do get in touch. We are currently looking for volunteers to help with any of the following:

  • Co-ordinating meetings and events
  • Research for a database of makers in the area
  • Helping to administer the online local goods website as we prepare for launch, and being an “admin” once the Beta goes live
  • Interviewing makers / writing stories and profiles on them for the blog (Update: Lovely Kim Winter has come on board to work on this – hurrah!)
  • Other bits of content writing for the forthcoming local goods website

Time-wise it’s flexible, starting from a couple of hours a week. If you’d like to do one-off tasks only, let us know too, there are plenty of those coming our way 🙂

Ideally you are based in Brixton, Herne Hill, Clapham, Camberweell, Stockwell or Dulwich.

If you’re interested in working on the project, drop us a line at hello@makerhood.com

Thank you!

Final call for contributions to our online survey

Update. Wonderful news: Nadia Gilani of South London Press is doing a piece on Makerhood for Tuesday’s edition! We’ve extended the survey so that SLP readers could contribute their views.

Thanks to everyone who has entered our online survey which Karen wrote about previously. We’ll be closing the survey on Thursday, 26th May. So, if you’ve not entered yet, then please do!

A reminder that one entrant, chosen at random, will get a lovely hamper from the Brixton deli CornerCopia.

Of course this won’t be the only chance to feed into the development of Makerhood, but we won’t always be able to offer you such a lovely prize as our way of saying thank you!

Remember, it’s just ten questions, and will take about five minutes of your time to complete. If that.

Go on, you know you want to….

Sympathy for the Devil

Well, not quite, but the opening words of this Rolling Stones classic have been going around my head as I thought of a way of trying to say hello, and to introduce myself.
 
I recently joined Karen, Kristina and their wonderfully talented friends, to help with the launch of Makerhood. So, if you’ve noticed a slight change in tone in some of Makerhood’s Twitter or Facebook activity; then I’ll probably responsible culpable.
 
I’ve been asked to say a little bit about myself, but as a shy and retiring type, I wasn’t quite sure what to say, or how to say it. So, here’s the result of a quick interview I did with myself down the potting shed.
 
Q. Welcome to the team! Why did you get involved with Makerhood?
A: Well, first of all it seemed like a great idea, so I was keen to see if I could help out in some way. I’ve a background in local media, community action and campaigns, so I hoped there was something I could offer. I also have a research based interest in social media as well as hyper-local media, so it’s nice to try and put some of that theoretical knowledge and understanding into practice. The only challenge is time…
 
Q: I hear you, so what exactly will you be doing?
A: Helping out with a bit of social media (Twitter, Facebook, the blog) and also some awareness raising work. I’ll be balancing this alongside my day job, playing cricket, training for a 10k and a few other bits and bobs, so if anyone would like to help me then that would be great!
 
Q: How well do you know the area?
A: Reasonably. I’ve always lived a short distance from Brixton. I’ve lived in East Dulwich/Peckham Rye for the last three years, and before that I spent another three years in Camberwell….

One of the things I love about Brixton, and London in general, is the way that places evolve and morph. You don’t visit an area for 6-12 months and suddenly loads of new and interesting things have cropped up. It’s such a vibrant city. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
 
Q: So what can we look forward to in the coming weeks/months?
A: Well, some of the team are working very hard on getting the Beta site up and running, that’s really exciting! We’ve just launched an online survey to get feedback and ideas from potential buyers and sellers, so we’d love more people to complete this so that we can then analyse the results.

We’ll also be organising some informal testing sessions, meets ups and the like, all of which will be a great opportunity to meet like minded people in the area.

Finally, I’ll be tweaking some of the Makerhood web presence. Karen and Kristina may be superwomen, but they can’t realistically be expected to do everything. So, if I can help them free up some of their time to do other things, then I’ll be happy – and hopefully they will be too!
 
Q: Damian Radcliffe, thank you very much.
A: Thank you

Ten Questions

As we’re busy working on the new local online marketplace we’ve begun to get excited about what you all might do with it! We thought that if we knew what you thought then we might be able to tweak the site to reflect that and make it even more useful to you. So we’ve put together a little survey to help us capture your ideas and feedback. While your answers will inform our pilot Brixton site the questions are exploring attitudes to locally-made goods regardless of where you live or work. So everyone, please take part!

There are ten questions and it should take only take a few minutes to complete. There’s even a prize! Locally-made, of course. One person, chosen at random, will get a lovely hamper from CornerCopia.

You can find the survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7FCW5FN

We really appreciate it and look forward to finding out what you think!

Thank you!

We go shopping!

Karen, Damian, Biba, Andy and I went to the lovely Crafty Fox Market at the Dogstar on Saturday. Fantastic! Great work from the organisers, three floors of lovely hand-made things and art, and great workshops. Artists and makers from all over London, and some from as far as Edinburgh and the Isle of White.

Among the sellers were James Ward (who created the lovely Crafty Fox logo) showing his amazing plates, Kanganarora with handmade textiles (absolutely loved the cow cushion!) and FabricNation making beautiful things from recycled fabrics. We also loved handmade puppets from Twisted Myth,  textile deer heads from Wooden Tree and cute creatures from Hope and Eden. And many many others.

Downstairs, there was a group of ladies totally consumed with learning to make brooches with Handmade in Tooting and Seaside Sisters – they came up with many beautiful pieces.  Ms Cupcake’s stall – from a new shop on Coldharbour lane– was constantly overcrowded. I’m personally not into cupcakes, but Damian had one and couldn’t stop talking about it. It was apparently delicious!

We brought some flyers and talked to people about Makerhood and the forthcoming local online marketplace. The makers we talked to were very positive; many said there should be one in their areas too – this was really encouraging.  Something to ponder for the future; meanwhile, I guess one option is to relocate to Brixton 🙂