A beautifully crafted website that helps people discover the possibilities of manufacturing that are usually just too hard to find.
So I stumbled on this site the other night in my never ending search for cnc routing on the web, and I found it so gourgeous, so beautiful, and so interesting, that I had to write a post about it. Make Works is Scottish, and for now, it only has listings of local businesses in Scotland, but they say that they plan to grow to other countries, I certainly hope they do. At any rate, it is more than worth visiting the site, if you have any interest at all in excellent documentation of manufacturing.
Make Works calls themselves factory finders, but they put the emphasis on custom fabrication, and its all about connecting designers and artists with manufacturing. So I guess you could say their intention is to make businesses whose clients have traditionally been other businesses “b2b” more accessible to individuals. What makes the website so unusual are the pictures and the stories they collected on a tour they made of Scotland, taking lots of photos and video, and meticulously documenting the various workshops they discovered:
The reason the website exists is because the founder and designer, Fi Scott, was so frustrated looking for manufacturing online. I can understand her frustration. I think that most of the best small manufacturers or craftsmen often have plenty to do without setting up a website that explains exactly what they do, and how they do it so that a layperson can understand them. In the long term it is always a good strategy to find new clients and create a larger, more spread out customer base, but in the short term, you just want to meet the current client’s deadline, and give that client the best service you can, and when that deadline has been met, there’s the next client waiting. I certainly have that problem myself. All the better when a third party steps in and does the networking, especially such an idealistic woman as Fi Scott seems to be.
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