We live in an age of high technology. Kickstarted by the Industrial Revolution, we’re now firmly into the realms of sci-fi with AI, driverless cars and cryptocurrencies. But the appetite many have for futuristic tech is more than matched by the lightning speed growth of the maker movement. The more advanced we humans get in some areas, the greater the draw towards hand-crafting, artisanal products and supporting small businesses.
In 2005, a decade before Mayku was born, Etsy launched. It was the first platform dedicated to selling handmade goods. In just over two years, they had seen their millionth sale, and within just a few years, Etsy had fifty employees and 650,000 users – 120,000 of whom were sellers – in 127 different countries.
In 2021, Etsy reported over 4.5m sellers on the platform and an incredible $2.2 billion in revenue. Over the intervening years, many other similar sites have appeared – even Amazon have tried to muscle in on this lucrative market – and tens of millions of creators now run global businesses from their homes.
It turns out that technological advances have enabled global reach for even the most modest of makers.
The World At Your Fingertips
Driven in part by the Covid-19 pandemic and changes in consumer shopping habits, the global eCommerce market is expected to total $5.55 trillion in 2022. The eCommerce software platform Shopify states that only 17.8% of sales were made from online purchases two years ago. That number is expected to reach 21% in 2022 and 24.5% by 2025.
Fulfilment has also become more accessible, with national postal providers competing with private companies to be the most cost-effective and efficient. Global fulfilment of orders is now something anyone with any size business can do with ease.
But while industrial production processes remain prohibitively expensive, the tools that will enable smaller creatives to make a broader range of items more easily are only just being developed.
The 3D Revolution
Take 3D printers. They’re excellent tools, and there’s no doubt that they’re becoming more ubiquitous. The technology itself dates back some 40 years, but desktop 3D printers only became accessible and affordable to more people in the late 2000s when one of the early patents entered the public domain. Large and small companies started to use 3D printing for prototyping, an important step in manufacturing. But it’s just that - a step. The machines have limitations, both in the timescales involved (a typical print can take 8-12 hours) and materials. Improvements are happening all the time, but it’s still too slow for some creators who are keen to level their businesses up faster.
At Mayku, we’re on a mission to empower creators with all the other machines they need to scale up from one to one thousand items. It’s so exciting to see more and more creators every day take power back into their hands and make things with the FormBox and, soon, the Multiplier.
The Small Business Bottom Line
Why should the curious, the creatives and the artisans feel obliged to work for someone else as a cog in the machine when they can have ready access to the tools needed to turn your passion into a business?
Mayku supports the inspirational maker movement by providing the tools, knowledge and community that creators need to launch their products into the world. We believe that this burgeoning cultural shift away from mass consumption has the power to change the world for the better. It will bring people closer to how their things are made and encourage a more collaborative, conscious and creative society.
If this thought fills you with as much fire as it does us, we want to hear from you! Read more about what we’re doing and what the future holds for Mayku over on our Crowdfunding page.
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