Custom Make Your Life with CustomMade.com

One of the biggest problems with getting custom made stuff is finding a good person to make it. Most of us don’t have the bandwidth to find skilled craftspeople, much less bid the job out, particularly if it’s a small one. The hassle, combined with perceived expense, leads most of us to mass-produced items that aren’t what we want and with which we have minimal emotional connection to.

A site called CustomMade is changing all that. They claim to be the “world’s largest matchmaker for custom goods.” They connect people who want custom stuff with a network of 3500 skilled craftspeople from the US and Canada.

The site can be used in a few ways. You can bid out a job, specifying exactly what you want and how much you want to spend; you can search for craftspeople by region; and you can see and purchase already-made items. Categories include furniture, jewelry, leather goods, tableware, and carpentry.

Since their start in 2008, CustomMade had completed 2800 custom jobs. The site has 40,000 goods to peruse from, most of which you can customize; e.g. getting a wedding ring you see in your size or a table to your dimensions.

Prices for goods like furniture are higher than IKEA and other box stores to be sure. But so is quality. And though it’s hard to quantify exactly, the nature of putting a bid out to a large pool of prospective fabricators probably yields more competitive pricing.

We talk a lot about heirloom design–the ideal that the items in our lives are high quality enough to be passed down to the next generation. CustomMade makes this ideal that much easier to achieve, taking much of the hassle out of custom, hight quality fabrication.

via Core77

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