In keeping with the “Wallingford local” spirit, some local entrepreneurs are test marketing a new hyperlocal business called, appropriately, ÜbrLocal.
The premise is simple: your neighbors are growing vegetables and making goods right nearby. You want those things. You are willing to buy those things, they want to sell you those things. So how do you find each other?
Enter ÜbrLocal, a web service that allows buyers and sellers to find each other locally:
Our mission is to provide a network for urban growers and producers to connect with consumers. We hope to create an entirely new highly-localized food economy that values human energy, under-utilized space, and the power of neighbors helping neighbors. For a product to be considered, “uber-local” it must be grown and made within roughly 10 miles of the consumer.
Founded by Liz Smith (of Wallingford), Kamel Patel, Dylan Davis and Alex Maughan, ÜbrLocal is seeded through Fledge, a “conscious company” incubator that takes business ideas and helps grow them into successful startups.
Liz explains that she became involved in “environmentalism with a bent for food-related activism and volunteer work” during college and, after an eleven month solo cross country journey working on farms and learning the “art of sustainable agriculture”, she landed in Seattle and started a certificate program n Sustainable Food and Agriculture Systems at Bainbridge Graduate Institute (BGI).
“I went into that program with a goal to develop me business ideas around designing resilient local food networks. It was there that I met Kamal and learned about ÜbrLocal. The rest is fast-paced, blurry history,” she said.
Kamal combined a background in working with an unlimited design service company with his work at BGI and a Permaculture Design Course on Orcas to begin to get ÜbrLocal in motion.
To market test their idea, ÜbrLocal has soft launched with the “Wallingford Pop-Up Project”: they’re featuring a small handful of local producers (within 10 miles) and targeting Wallingford consumers specifically:
Shop weekly: new products will be added every week. Please see our store here. Interested sellers, please follow the contact instructions below.
Buy items online using your credit card (currently you have to input your information with every purchase – sorry)
Pick up your Product at our ÜbrLocal Pop-up Stand at the Wallingford Center every Wednesday (4pm – 8pm) and Sunday (12pm-5pm) beginning Sunday April 7th. Click here for more info.
After the month-long test run, Liz explains that:
On April 25th we stand up in front of a large group of our peers, the Seattle business community, potential investors and people like you to share our vision and our story. We want to be able to show them that Seattle is ready to relocalize our food economy in a peer-to-peer, online network. That is why we need as many people as possible to partake in our Wallingford experiment.
Sounds like a great idea. Good luck!