Open now, makers first
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 ‘art’. No subscriptions. No pretending.
Makers can open a shop today. Shoppers, create an account and we’ll email you the moment there’s something to browse.
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. Every fee, explained.
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 doors are open. That’s a starting point rather than a finished thing. 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.
Luma is open, makers first
Makers can open a shop and start listing today. Nothing goes live until a person has read how you work, so the first thing you build is the part shoppers will read.
Shoppers come in a little later, once the categories are settled and there’s enough on the shelves to be worth browsing. These first weeks are makers, listings, and two founders reading every one.
If you make things
Opening a shop is free, and you build the whole thing before any payment setup. We take 7% when something sells.
Dig out photos and videos of your work before you start. A person reads how you make things before your shop goes live, and shoppers read it before they buy.
If you shop
Every listing tells you how it was made, in the maker’s own words. You no longer need to be a detective to find real handmade online.
Create an account and we’ll write to you the day there’s something to browse.
How to be part of it
- 01
Create your account
One form, and one question in it: are you here to make, or to shop? Nothing else changes between the two.
- 02
Open a shop, or wait for the doors
Makers go straight to setting up a shop, and it costs nothing to build one. Shoppers get an email from us the day there’s something to browse.
- 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 people 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.
Be part of the beginning
Luma is open to makers now, and to shoppers once there’s enough to browse. Opening is only day one though: what Luma grows into after that gets shaped by the makers and shoppers who are here for it.
Create your account