Coming this autumn
A UK marketplace where handmade means handmade
Built to protect handmade. Only work a person actually made, so makers get found and shoppers know what they’re buying.
No factories. No AI. No subscriptions. No pretending.
Makers and shoppers. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Or tell us what you need first, which takes about four minutes.
Photos by Roman Kraft, Eva Bronzini and Anna Tarazevich.
Photos by Roman Kraft, Eva Bronzini, Anna Tarazevich, Zsolt Bodnár and Annie Spratt.
What handmade is up against
Most marketplaces say handmade and then fill up with things nobody made by hand: print-on-demand mugs, dropshipped stock, the same digital file sold over and over, designs bought in from someone else. A seller can list hundreds of those in an afternoon. A maker might finish two things in a week.
Both end up in the same search results. The makers we spoke to kept saying the same thing: they felt invisible. Their work was listed. It just made no difference. Shoppers can’t tell what’s what either, and the word means a little less every time. Eventually the work quietly stops turning up.
Nothing stays up unless a person made it.
What we do about it
- 01
Handmade only, and community verified
Tools are part of the craft. Mass-produced and AI-generated work aren’t. Every listing is held to the same standard, and when the community questions one, a human reviews it.
- 02
A new shop isn’t buried under a bigger one
You don’t need a head start or a thousand listings. A maker who joined last week can still turn up in front of the right shopper.
- 03
You pay when you sell, not to exist
Having a shop costs nothing, and there are no quotas or penalties. We take 7% when something sells.
Photo by Annie Spratt
We asked before we built
We’re both developers. We’ve built every part of Luma ourselves, so when a maker tells us something should work differently, there’s nobody we have to ask.
The handmade standard is written and the platform is nearly ready. Opening this autumn is a starting point. We know what we’re building next, and we’ll keep asking makers and shoppers whether we’ve got it right.
150+
replies in two days, when we asked UK makers and shoppers whether they wanted this.
We’d hoped for thirty or forty. What we got was a lot of people who had clearly been waiting to be asked. Read what they told us.
How to be part of it
- 01
Join the waitlist
One email address. You’ll hear when Luma opens, and get the odd newsletter or blog post from us while we build.
- 02
Tell us what you need
Two surveys, one for makers and one for shoppers. Four minutes. What you tell us goes straight into the standard and the way the site works.
- 03
Help it get going
Follow along. Tell someone who makes things, or someone who buys them. A place like this only works if enough of the right people turn up.
Which one are you?
Maker
You design it. You make it. You care about your work.
Your work takes days. It ends up next to listings that took someone an afternoon, and you’re tired of watching it disappear under them. You’d like the people who find your shop to be there because handmade means something to them.
Shopper
You want to know that “handmade” is handmade.
You’d rather own one thing someone spent time on than three that came off a machine, and you’d like to stop having to guess which is which.
When something slips through
Luma is a UK marketplace for genuinely handmade goods. Some sellers will try to slip past that. We go looking before anyone has to tell us. Listings are audited on a regular cycle, and anyone can flag one that looks wrong. A person reads it, decides, and tells the maker why.
Most makers will never hear from us about any of this. The audits are there for the listings that were never handmade.
You can read the handmade standard in full, or find out who we are, before you decide whether to give us your email address.
Be part of the beginning
Luma opens this autumn. Leave your email and you’ll hear from us before it does. Opening is only day one though: what Luma grows into after that gets shaped by the makers and shoppers who are here for it.
For makers and shoppers. No spam. Unsubscribe anytime. See how we handle your data in our Privacy Policy.