A New Directory for Worker Co-ops Products

People buy from Amazon because it's convenient. You search for what you need and it's there. That convenience makes Amazon visible. If you want to buy from worker-owned companies, you have to search individual websites, if you even know where to look. With all the headwinds facing the movement in our political and economic culture, it's no surprise that just getting a worker co-op up and running successfully is more than enough work. The cooperative economy is big, but it isn't convenient, so it isn't visible.

I built workerowned.info to help change that: a free, searchable marketplace that indexes products from worker-owned businesses and puts them in one place.

How it works

The site scrapes product data from a co-op's online store — Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, whatever they're running — and indexes it for search. If your co-op has an online store on one of these platforms, getting listed is straightforward. When someone searches for "organic coffee" or "union tees" or "hot sauce," they see matching products across all the listed stores, with links directly to each product page. All traffic goes to the co-op's own site. Nothing goes through me.

The site is free to use, has no ads, and doesn't collect user data. One of the great things about designing a service for use instead of shareholder value is you don't have to try to trick anyone. Remember Google in 1998 when it was run by its engineers?

What's inside

The marketplace currently indexes 22,000+ products across eleven categories: coffee and tea, food and pantry goods, apparel, books and media, beer and brewing, art and prints, home goods and services, personal care, music, games, and tech and software. The stores range from long-established co-ops like Equal Exchange and AK Press to newer operations like Soapbox Co-op in Chicago and Means Workwear in Minneapolis.

There are worker-owned alternatives to both Bandcamp (Mirlo) and Etsy (Artisans Cooperative). The Palestinian Soap Cooperative sells traditional Nablus olive oil soap. Justseeds is a printmaking co-op of 40 artists. Real Pickles in western Massachusetts does community-supported fermentation. Pedal People in Northampton hauls your trash and recycling by bicycle with a crew of 27 worker-owners.

Beyond the marketplace, the site includes a location-based directory of worker-owned coffee shops, restaurants, bars, and grocery stores — searchable by city. If you're in Baltimore, you can find Red Emma's and Thread Coffee. In Boston, Democracy Brewing. In Ithaca, Gimme Coffee.

Why it matters

This is a tool for the cooperative movement, but it's also aimed at people who haven't found it yet. I recently posted the site on Hacker News, a community of engineers and tech folks, and the site hit 30K+ views in 2 days. There is intense untapped interest and support for this movement. The pitch to those outside of the movement is simple, and it doesn't require any particular politics: products and services from worker-owned companies are better. They're better because innovation, hard work, and workers' lives are aligned with the success of the business. Americans already understand this. They know startups are where new ideas come from. They know that a father and son, who own a business and do the work, make the best pizza. Worker cooperatives are built on the same principle. They are places where it makes sense for workers to put pride into their work. Co-ops extend that ownership to everyone who does the work, not just the founders or the family.

The more people who can see that, the stronger the case for economic democracy becomes.

The site is live at workerowned.info. If you know of a worker-owned business that should be listed, there's a submit form on the site, or get in touch at sftbiesai@gmail.com.