Gearing Up

Hello,

We want to say a bit about what we’ve been planning at Folksy and where we hope that planning will take us. Since 2008 Folksy has grown year-on-year to now have around 8000 active shops, over 300,000 visitors a month and around 8,000 orders of the wonderful things that crafters make. This growth has been achieved through ploughing profits back into the business, employing the most talented people available and working incredibly hard to do what we believe in; creating the best service and platform for crafters in the UK to sell their work. None of this would have been possible without the goodwill of the makers, artists and designers who use Folksy and whenever we need affirmation about what we’re doing we look at some of the work and of the talented crafters who use Folksy. It’s this belief in craft and in the wealth of talented crafters in the UK that has led us to the most ambitious scaling of the business since we began.

Our plan is to create the best platform to promote and sell modern British craft. To do this will require investment which we’re in the process of securing and resourcing the immediate plans to re-design the site and re-architect the application so that it can scale with increased page views. We’ll be talking more about the re-design work in later posts and in particular how to create new ways that buyers can browse and discover items and shops to increase sales. For now I want to say a bit about how the team are changing.

Firstly, Hilary Pullen who has been such a force of energy and enthusiasm on the blog and in the forums, is leaving Folksy. We’re looking to create a team more local to Sheffield that can work together and in the coming weeks we’ll be working hard to identify someone who can fill Hilary’s shoes and take the blog on to celebrate modern British craft. You’ve been great Hilary, thank you and we wish you all the very best in your next challenge.

Staying on the staffing of Folksy, Andrew Pendrick has joined full-time as Design Director. Andrew has only tinkered with Folksy until now, but he is leading the re-design work the first phase of which will launch in October. We’re all super excited by his initial wireframes and sketches (except Doug and Rob who start to sweat with the amount of coding that needs to be done). Frankie Roberto will also be joining Folksy later in the summer as Front End Developer and UX Lead (he’s already started on some project work). The core team to fulfill Phase II should be in place by September and we’ll look to expand on that team as we resource our project work.

We’ve got big plans, but we also know that we need to get some of the basics right first and our plans for the next eighteen months looks to address existing issues as well as progressing the service to be the best platform for modern British craft. Thanks for being part of the journey so far. We hope you’ll continue to work with us and support us during Phase II.