Design Meets Craft

Disrupts one of the largest labor markets by establishing the first transparent and blockchain-based handicraft collaboration platform.

Design meets Craft connects designers and artisans around the world on the first fair and transparent co-creation platform.
The global handicraft market is the 2nd largest labor market in developing countries, the 4th in the world. Highly fragmented and characterized by millions of small businesses and a high proportion of women, the market is intransparent and unfair. Millions of artisans and designer do not work under professional circumstances, do not have the opportunity to co-create and do not have access to the global market in a systematic way.
Artisans are lacking access to contemporary design, education, professional business and quality management.
Designers are looking for access to culture-specific production skills, production facilities for of small quantities and more and more sense and meaning in work.
Not only sales and logistics processes have to be optimized to ensure a global fair trade but also design, production, collaboration and business processes. In a first step Design meets Craft connects designers and artisans through an algorithm and tagging system. Then the designer can choose the craftspeople she wants to work with. Through collaboration tools, they can exchange designs, ideas, etc. of which everything is documented on the blockchain. As soon as an order is confirmed a smart contract is issued - here we also protect the IP rights, payments, all legal aspects.
The solution: Design meets Craft- a matching, collaboration, e-learning, and sales platform to build the first global blockchain eco and co-creation system for the handicraft market.

In the handicraft eco-system, you will not find any comparable solutions so far.
Obviously, one can find country and region solutions or product specific solutions but not in a comparable holistic approach. From a global perspective, you can find platform solutions just for the sales part of the business, like Etsy.
But, even ETSY was managed to become a unicorn. ETSY is a typical solution where single entrepreneurs and VC became rich without involving the community in this success model.
We would like the community and us as platform provider to become successful together.

Design meets Craft is a 'Tech4Impact' solution managing the following processes on one global tech platform:
Profiling, matching, connection, co-creation, production, sales, logistics, services, and education.
Design meets Craft will use the latest standard of P2P platforms.
Blockchain powered technology and smart contracts help to ensure secure, fair and decentralized legal and business
processes along the value chain (incl. IP-Rights). DMC will offer state of the art collaboration processes and embedded tools to run design, production and business processes convenient, efficient and professionally for all parties.

Design meets Craft is still in the seed phase. Final impact and business metrics still have to be defined during the ongoing process.

Our objectives are to involve as many stakeholders of the global handicraft as possible to support the movement and platform and to convince as many as possible artisans and designers from all over the world to subscribe on the DmC platform and use it as a professional tool to collaborate, to co-create and to manage its processes and businesses.

It is our vision to reduce poverty through empowering artisans and designers, to earn a fair income with their skills.
We achieve this in establishing a creative and fair business environment for the global handicraft sector using digital transformation.
Moreover, we aim to save traditional techniques and skills.
In establishing a disrupting platform and marketplace for one of the oldest industries with the newest technology and inclusive business models, we can empower the artisans to be part of the market.
In five years we would like to be present on all continents and at least 50% of the countries in the world.

Design meets Craft is addressing artisans everywhere in the world. The market is atomised and so far there was no platform that connected the education, co-creation and sales aspect. The platform empowers them to get connected to international designers, as well as education and sales opportunities. From our experience most of the artisans have smart phones. With Design meets Craft we create a save eco-system for them to meet designers to help them with contemporary designs and work opportunities. Through simple and intuitive interfaces it will be easy for them to connect and co-create and learn.

Design meets Craft is not operational yet, but we run a beta test which is the ABURY Design Experience of ABURY. The ABURY Design Experience works as a global designer contest. Last year, designers from 35 countries applied to work with an artisan community. The winner gets a grant then to go to the country and work with a community. ABURY has already sent designers to work with artisans in Morocco, Ethiopia, Ecuador and Romania.What happened is that ABURY is working in the meantime with 6 artisan communities over the world, with about 120 artisans in total.

Design meets Craft is founded by Andrea Bury and Frank Schmidt. Andrea is a marketing expert and visionary social entrepreneur. She started ABURY, a social fashion business and content driven e-commerce platform. ABURY brings together designers and artisans through an annual global contest, the idea for Design meets Craft was born as more artisan communities started to contact her. Frank is a serial entrepreneur and start up investor. He is invested in several digital businesses in Germany. His expertise is in strategy development and finances.

DmC is designed as a community-owned platform ensuring that the community will develop and govern it`s own platform and marketplace together. People can gain equity through positive activity.
Additionally, it is an inclusive movement to join forces (e.g. Government, NGOs, Impact investor/angels, brands/sponsors, service provider and artisans, designer/suppliers) under one roof to jointly develop and finance the future of the local and global handicraft businesses.

A Code of Understanding guarantees that the business will operate under international ethical standards and that all parties are treated equally.

We will start with selected communities in certain countries (Europe, Africa) and expand step by step to more countries.

We would use Solve's support to develop the platform and hire specialised developers for android and IoS to develop the app version of the online platform.
Moreover we would use it to create the infrastructure and do a road show with the relevant multiplicators in the countries we would start working in. Like this, we can develop the local networks and relations further.

The major risks are lack of funding, the interest of stakeholders in the DmC movement, platform and infrastructure (incl. HR) to operate the platform and processes behind. And to the risk to fail in our inclusive approach and to moderate diverse interests of different parties.