Indyish ideas about Cooperatives and Collectives

Co-op’s and collectives are welcome to join Indyish! We know of some cool groups around Montreal who have brought together different kinds of artists (sculptors, playwrights, designers) in some interesting and mutually beneficial ways. We’d like to help the folks involved in those kinds of organizations, if we can at all.

If you have already organized and would like to become Indyish (in order to take advantage of our easy e-commerce, low commission, supportive network, and wacky highjinks) then by all means, email us! Email: NewArtist @ indyish.com. Once Indyish, your group will put one person in charge of being the Indyish contact: i.e.; keeping all your content and orders up to date, and promoting the fact that folks can buy your stuff through our site. If a collective does a good job of doing this for all it’s members then it probably deserves whatever additional commission it takes from it’s members sales.

Note: these groups, like other Indyish artist groups, will have their own policies and systems which, it should be understood, Indyish takes no part in. Similarly, these groups have no power to impose their will on decisions made on our end. We are all quite independent of one another.

Indyish, we might add, is not a cooperative or a collective. Indyish is Risa’s baby, and was co-founded by her and Elran. It is an open source project: all of the code used to build this site (every funky little functionality) is freely available (we’ll be adding easy download packages of our toolkits as soon as we can get around to it). Our business model is inspired by the people who made open source software and principles commercially successful- especially Red Hat and Lulu. But here’s how we’re different: Once Indyish is able to cover costs, including some staff, all additional income will go into a pot for Indyish collaborations. These are events and projects that are managed by Risa and her team and paid for by us. With these we aim to make great work with other Indyish artists. Sort of collective, but not quite. Collectiv-ish? no. Indyish!