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Makeably is now Hatch; custom goods ecommerce site updates

One of the borough's hottest startups changes its name, improves its usability for both sides of its community.

Map coasters on sale on Hatch, the custom goods ecommerce site.

Custom goods ecommerce site Makeably became Hatch late Monday night. Technically Brooklyn spoke to cofounder, Anastasia Leng, who explained that after seeking considerable feedback from its community, the cofounders decided to switch to a name that was easier to say, spell and understand. So now it’s Hatch that’s one of Brooklyn’s hottest startups.

Along with the new name, Leng and her cofounder, Ryan Hayward, rolled out some significant new features last night. While they were working on rolling out this broad update to their business and brand, the team lost their office space. Makeably/Hatch had been housed at 3rd Ward. In fact, Hayward was at the dd:Impact conference in Dumbo when news first started to circulate about the closure.

But they got it done. They are now looking for a new place to work from.

Back to Hatch‘s business model: lots of craftspeople can and would like to make lots more versions of their products, said Leng. They don’t just want to offer ready made, ready-to-ship products.

Note the two pink areas on the image. Those are the "hot spots" described below, from the Hatch.co site.

Hatch is totally focused on helping buyers and makers collaborate to come up with custom products. So, for example, if you see a photo of a dress on the site, it’s not just that dress that’s for sale. Makers show the dress as a starting place to begin a conversation with a buyer about just which changes they could make to the dress before shipping. So buyers get exactly what they want. Hatch gets a 5 percent transaction fee on each purchase.

Leng said, “At the heart of what we do is making it possible for any person to put their creative spin on any product on the site.”

Their newest update is making it easier for buyers to express what kind of customizations they would like by making it easier for makers to express what kind of customizations that they can do.

The new update uses visual hot spots on photos of customizable products. Say you were looking at a dress with a hem that was a different color than the skirt itself. There might be a hotspot on that hem saying “Also available in green, blue and white.”

In its first beta, launched in November, the original site simply expressed customizations by asking makers to say what they can change. Though they closed $10,000 worth of sales in their first six weeks of existence, they found that a lot of makers were describing their customizations too broadly to really help give buyers ideas.

In this new version, when a maker signs up or adds a new product (the team calls this “onboarding”), they upload a photo of an example product. Then they drag over little tags onto the photo, and place the tags on parts of the photo. They compose questions for each of these tags to show buyers how they could customize. They are finding this is bringing more makers all the way through the onboarding process than the site’s previous, form based system did. Here’s what a product’s customization options looked like in the previous version and here’s one in the new format.

Hatch is (at the moment) a coffee-shop bound team of five (till they find new digs). The startup has secured $900,000 in investments through a combination of institutional investors, including 500 Startups and Great Oaks, in addition to friends and angels.

Leng said that, for her, success for Hatch would be enabling makers to grow with the site and offer enough products that they could quit their day jobs. Currently, the site lists about 1,500 products from something like six to seven hundred different makers.

Companies: Hatch / Great Oaks Venture Capital / 3rd Ward / 500 Startups
Series: Brooklyn
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