1. Purpose
The objective of Craft Coop LLC is to generate income and opportunity for artisanal makers, by providing an online platform for facilitating sales and community action. This platform is designed to solve several problems:
- Prevent same-marketplace competition from:
- Drop-shipped products,
- print-on-demand (PoD) products, and
- all forms of AI generated products
- Incentivize collective success
- Provide scalable marketing and cross-sell opportunities to our members
- Provide "works out of box" storefront capabilities for local cooperatives and collectives with member-managed stocks
- Prevent "rug pull" scenarios involving organizational priority shift or VC pressure by encoding priorities into governance and business structure
- Provide robust web-based platform abuse management tools
The business is designed to either deliver these goals or to dissolve. Explicitly ruled out is conversion to a non-cooperative model, because it is impossible to align the goals of the business with a centralized structure.
2. Organization
Craft Coop LLC is designed with the idea of a three-tier structure:
Members <-> Board & Compliance Committee <-> Operator
Members elect the Board, with eligible candidates including all Members in good standing.
The Compliance Committee determines whether an otherwise-qualified Member is in violation of policy, including product/listing concerns and Member behavioral concerns (such as delisting members who consistently violate maker policies like those prohibiting dropship/slop).
The Board appoints the Compliance Committee and decides business policy on a quarterly basis, providing the Operator tier with business constraints such as acceptable fees, acceptable business maneuvers, and if necessary, directly replacing leadership of the Operator/business unit.
The business is a co-operative in formation structured for an orderly and inevitable transition to full member governance, with compensation for founder contributions and progression of initial board and committee members from founder-selected to governance-selected members explicitly codified in the business specification. Transition to full member governance is guaranteed by the business model and governing documents by simple membership thresholds and time, and these transitions trigger automatically as a result of business growth and adoption by members. It is not possible for the Operator to defer transition to a full cooperative without violating the governing structure of the business.
3. Current status
Craft Coop LLC has been incorporated in the state of Virginia. The application has largely been built, with a functional staging site providing member signup, purchases, listings, shipping, and invoicing services. The technical infrastructure has also been designed and implemented for testing.
The next steps are to launch a limited technology test providing product sales for a limited number of beta members, who will utilize the platform for commerce and provide information to the Operator for the resolution of issues prior to full launch. Simultaneously, the operational structure of the cooperative is under direct development and iteration with prospective members and prepared for submission to counsel.