Distributed Design
  • Introduction
  • State of Art on Distributed Design
  • Advisory Board
    • Moving from an individual to a collective worldview
      • On Transitions
    • The importance of creative education
    • Making Machines that Make
  • Can we certify our Values?
  • Glossary
    • Values + Quality
    • Glossary of terms and concepts
    • A how-to for this book.
  • Our Wellness
    • Distributed Design for Distributed Care
      • Next Steps: co-designing open-source walking aids
      • From Lorenzo’s bike to everyone’s bike
      • Wearables
      • Fabcare
  • The World Around Us.
    • Cosmo-local work: Organisational practices for equitable and sustainable living*
      • Tzoumakers: An open source agricultural community
      • Grouu
      • vivihouse
  • Business Models, money talks
    • Why we need to strengthen the business muscle of distributed design
      • Remodel: One-stop shop for designing open source hardware business models
      • Fab City Store
      • Version_01 Lamp
  • Getting together, Collaborating
    • Lead Essay
    • Gameboks
    • Like the air we breathe. Maker economics, the stories within the story
    • Precious Plastic
  • Platform Ecosystem
    • Fablabs.io
    • Wikifactory
    • Make.Works
      • Make Works Derby and Derbyshire
      • Make Works United Arab Emirates (UAE)
    • Materiom
    • Faberin
    • Fab Chain
  • OUTRO
    • Designing Emergent Futures
    • Contribute, Copy, Share
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  • Who we are
  • Format
  • Our actions
  • Business Model

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  1. Business Models, money talks
  2. Why we need to strengthen the business muscle of distributed design

Fab City Store

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Last updated 5 years ago

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By the Fab City Store team Michael Araujo, Arnaud Delente, Pauline Distel, Sarah Goldberg, Virginie de Labarre, Soumaya Nader, Lenaïk Née, Quentin Perchais, Aruna Ratnayake.

Who we are

The Fab City Store supports designers, craftsmen and makers who build the city of tomorrow : sustainable, open and social. Whether they upcycle our waste or produce locally, all rethink our current system of production and consumption for a sustainable model, combining local manufacturing and global cooperation.

The Fab City Store gathers makers and consumers around a more sustainable production system sharing common values ;

  • HYPER-LOCAL PRODUCTION : We are looking for products fabricated as close to the place of consumption as possible to avoid unnecessary transportation and energy expenses.

  • RESPONSIBLE MATERIALS : We value the use of sustainable and sourced materials from re-use, recycling or upcycling.

  • DISTRIBUTABLE : We believe in open collaboration for a better distribution of knowledge and resources and more efficient designs.

Format

The Fab City Store is not a physical store. It is a support network for designers to contribute and build towards more sustainable consumption and production methods. The Fab City Store aims to be a global and shareable knowledge platform to develop local networks, specific to the characteristics of each fabric, metropolis, region or community in which it would be applied. It was built from the initiative of Parisian makerspaces and fabrication spaces to help and support their creators.

Participating in Re:Publica2019 is for the Fab City Store the opportunity to think about ways to replicate the idea of the Fab City Store Grand Paris to other cities, European or global. The aim is to transfer the knowledge and good practices discovered in the fabric of Great Paris to other urban fabrics, to build bridges between the makers communities across borders in order to be able to move towards more sustainable consumption models, limiting the transport of materials in favor of information, ideas, models of operation.

The workshop organized for Re:Publica2019 aimed to crowdsource the map of the Berlin’s manufacturing ecosystem, as well as opening the ethical charter to the problematics of the Berlin fabric. The charter and map became two artefacts to share the principles and ideas of the Store, in the hope to create a local initiative to support the various creators and responsible manufacturers.

Our actions

To reach this objective, it is necessary to be integrated in a fabric of different actors helping them all, creators but also manufacturers and users, to improve their work ethic and consumption. Our actions are two-folds : help designers create and help them sell their products.

The goal is not only to offer ethical products to consumers but to help designers make those products. Through our knowledge of the parisian local fabric, we build the ecosystem necessary for the creators to design and fabricate their products as easily as possible. We also help the designers through the organisation of meetups and workshops on topics such as communication or business development.

To help creators sell their production, we try to participate in a wide array of events in order to find the best context for them to promote their design, from B2C pop up stores to B2B museum shop exhibits. Through our network of architects and designers, we also try to create relations between products prescribers and creators. Finally, the goal is also to sensibilize the public to the values we hold dear and encourage them to make a committed purchase, thus working on creating a visible and understandable label.

Business Model

It is important for us to create a real sense of community and engagement, so it feels necessary for us to have the creators we work with, pay a membership fee to take part in the store’s different activities, Popup stores, workshops and all. We also take a fee on all the sales made through the Fab City Store as we feel it is safer for the designers allowing for no upfront costs and sharing the incentives between the designers and the team. But for now, the Fab City Store is still looking for a sustainable business model and relies heavily on volunteer work from the team and subsidies.