It's difficult to discover independent brands because online shopping is dominated by big tech companies and large retailers. Direct-to-consumer brands have flourished via social media ads and the costs to reach new customers have increased drastically. To help make it easier to discover, track, and analyze independent direct-to-consumer brands, we developed emprezzo.

The site was developed as a side project over the last few months. It began with a short Google list of some of our favorite ecommerce sites and brands. Using GatsbyJS, we developed a site to make it easier to visually browse the shops. Over time, we integrated social media stats, product data, traffic rankings and other publicly available data to gauge the popularity of stores over time.

It can hard to gauge the popularity of stores in the digital realm. There's no public signage and it can be easy for much to go unseen when there are many platforms and filtered views. What is popular in search platforms is not necessarily popular on social platforms, and vice versa. Emprezzo is intended to help discover independent direct-to-consumer brands, across platforms without the need for using a big tech marketplace or search engine.

The project is still in development and will continue to evolve. There are currently ~500 stores listed the next steps are to make it easier to filter and search the existing entries. Take a look and mark some of your favorites by using the 'favorite' button in the header.