I totally agree - we built https://indieshops.co/ in order to solve for the "quality first" alternative you mentioned.
We found that the majority of online shopping today consisted of 1) buying basics (read: cheap mass products) on Amazon or 2) getting advertised brands to you on Instagram/Fb/Google and hoping the one you like finds you. We hope that Indieshops provides an alternative where you can discover high quality brands.
Nice! Any plans for other markets (and filtering for them)? I gather it's all 'made with love in the USA' currently.
And how big is too big to be called 'indie'? If you take it quite literally it disallows having two shop fronts, but then to disallow that and allow online-only international-shipping... Just curious how you draw a line.
Thanks for the feedback! We're not deliberately making it US-only (in fact we have a few Canadian and Euro companies) but agree that navigating by market (or delivers-to) would be very useful!
We too are wrestling with that question, what should be the threshold for an "indie" company? We don't want to limit it so much that it's not useful for day-to-day shopping (ie too niche/etsy-ish), but haven't been too prescriptive yet about how big is too big. Hopefully users like you could help us define it!
We found that the majority of online shopping today consisted of 1) buying basics (read: cheap mass products) on Amazon or 2) getting advertised brands to you on Instagram/Fb/Google and hoping the one you like finds you. We hope that Indieshops provides an alternative where you can discover high quality brands.