Home

A new way for makers and sellers to connect with the people who will love their work.

I had a couple of paragraphs here about why online selling and advertising are currently rubbish, but honestly I think we all know 😂 if you'd still like to know why I think a new approach is needed, click here!

The Wandering Merchant is an experiment to try and showcase small makers and sellers in a way that’s as unintrusive and useful as possible: A brief weekly newsletter featuring nine small independent UK-based businesses with just a name, an image and a paragraph or two - it’ll look a bit like the below. No hard sell, no spam.

The sellers will rotate each issue, with returning businesses coming back around maybe once every two months. It’ll be free to receive, with sellers paying a small reasonable fee based on the circulation once the number of readers makes it worthwhile.

I'd love for you to sign up, and support this little experiment to make the online marketplace a bit more independent, ethical and personal. If you have any questions or comments please drop me a line at mark@uncommon.works.

I'd like to receive the Wandering Merchant

I'd like to showcase my business in the Wandering Merchant

You will receive an email up to once a week, with a brief selection of small, independent UK-based makers and sellers, as well as news related to the Wandering Merchant.

Subscribe

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from :

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices.

The essentials:

  1. The products you advertise cannot be based on licensed (or unlicensed) pop culture images you don't own. No characters from books, TV or movies, nothing based on anyone else's brand.
  2. Your products must be your own, no ambassadors, affiliates, franchises or resellers. Ideally made by you.
  3. No products that consist solely of a "quirky" or "hilarious" phrase decorating some generic object, e.g a bit of wood with "Nah then" on it.
  4. Physical products only for now, no services or digital downloads.
  5. Refurbished or repurposed items are fine, but not unmodified second hand items.

Some of these may be flexible; if you have a good counterpoint do drop me a line.

Listings will be free to start with, until we build up a bit of a readership. I'll then ask a reasonable fee per appearance - probably starting from £5 or £10 - which will increase with the number of readers. You can start or stop whenever you want.

If all that sounds good to you, please fill in your details below and I'll be in touch when your first appearance is up! You're not committing to anything, just asking to be contacted when there's a spot available.

Please do share this page to your friends and fellow sellers - the more readers and the more sellers we get, the better for everyone!

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from The Wandering Merchant:

The Wandering Merchant will store your name, business details and email address for the purposes of arranging your listing, updating you on news relating to the newsletter, and having conversations about how it all works. You'll also receive the newsletter yourself, of course. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices.

Extra info:

When your slot is coming up, I'll ask you for a title, a picture and some text. You'll be able to showcase your whole business or (recommended) a single product or line.

I'll be curating the selection to make sure quality is high and there's a balance of different types of item, so I may ask you to wait in the queue if we're overloaded with a particular type of item.

When your listing comes up will be completely arbitrary, but sooner or later everyone will get some juicy ones - remember you'll be coming around at most every two months. If you turn down or delay your slot without a good reason to try and get a better one you may not be offered another. I may adjust this in future (e.g. adjusting fees according to previous years' traffic) - for the time being the initial fees should be low enough it won't feel too tough, and you'll be staying in peoples' consciousness even if you're not getting a tonne of clicks on a particular slot.

I'll be monitoring clicks and able to tell you exactly how much traffic each appearance is sending to your site, and I'll be doing everything I can to optimise the newsletter to get everyone the most sales because it's in all our interest.