If you could read our internal group chats, you’d see a colorful stream of reactions (❤️💛✨🥺🤩🙌👑😍🌶, and even the woefully unhip 😂) as we fawn over the small brands we’ve discovered while building Marmalade. Today, we are excited to bring this experience to you at marmalade.co, where we hope you will discover small brands you hadn’t heard of but are excited to find, as if you were walking down a side street exploring a new city.
If the headlines showing record-setting Black Friday sales figures and all-time highs in Small Business Saturday spending are any indication, we don’t have to convince you that there’s a vast landscape of thoughtful small brands out there waiting to be discovered. And what better time to showcase small brands than in the heart of the holiday shopping season?
We have the ambitious goal for Marmalade to connect shoppers and small brands in a meaningful way. It’s a little bit like a love triad:
We are incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation to ensure that we are building Marmalade in service of each of these three relationships. To build on that, we are putting our guiding principles out in the open:
Marmalade 🤝 Small Brands
Commitment to small brands with a passion for their craft.
We strive to demonstrate our commitment to small brands through action. We send our users directly to online storefronts, giving business owners the spotlight they deserve to showcase their products and tell their stories. You won’t find a shopping cart on our site and we don’t take a cut of sales, ensuring that the small brands keep the revenue.
Small Brands 🤝 You
Products you can’t find anywhere else that feel just right.
We said we didn’t need to convince you that small brands are awesome, but we can’t help ourselves. Through building Marmalade we’ve come to believe that for each product around us, there’s an entrepreneur who has built a business selling higher quality or more interesting versions of that product online. By helping you discover them, Marmalade makes it easier to shop small and leaves you feeling like “yesssss, this is what I’ve been looking for.” And because the Marmalade platform is made up of small brands only, your actions are directly equipping these small brands with the resources to focus on what they do best — bringing to market the products that only they have the passion, insight, and ability to create.
You 🤝 Marmalade
Brands you vibe with the most, not the ones that pay the most.
On most search engines and marketplaces, the brands that pay the most show up as the top results. Not only does this create a vicious cycle where the largest brands get the lion’s share of digital foot-traffic, it makes us as consumers wonder — can we even trust the top results anymore? What else does the world have to offer? We built Marmalade by taking a different approach: we prioritize our users by showing you the small brands we think you will be the most excited to see. Overall, this focus allows us to spread the love more evenly across the landscape of small brands — a truer reflection of our diverse tastes and preferences.
What will you discover on Marmalade?
We are so excited to have reached this milestone, and our journey is just beginning. Give Marmalade a try! Start by searching for that perfect gift or by browsing our curated collection of stocking stuffers. Our goal is to make small brands easier for you to find. Send us an email at hello@marmalade.co — we love hearing your feedback and especially what you find! We can’t do this without you.
