Founded by Cayley Pater and Andy Ives in 2018, Made Trade was a curated marketplace for ethically sourced, sustainably made home goods and furniture that redefined the sustainable home vertical.
Made Trade
Building a new standard in sustainable retail
Made Trade redefined sustainable shopping, creating a marketplace that brought together over 150 ethical brands and curated $200M in responsibly made home goods and furniture. With a customer base of 43,000 and more than $10M in revenue, we built a category-defining platform that proved sustainability and commerce could work hand in hand. Every product we sold met rigorous sustainability sourcing standards, ensuring exceptional craftsmanship, fair labor, and responsibly-sourced materials remained at the heart of every purchase.
A seamlessly integrated, scalable tech ecosystem
Made Trade wasn’t just a marketplace, it was a fully automated, high-efficiency commerce engine. We architected a complex, API-driven tech stack that seamlessly connected over 30 best-in-class services, including Shopify Plus, Onport, Klaviyo, Gorgias, and Rebuy, to power our category-defining dropship marketplace.
With automation at its core, we scaled operations efficiently, supporting every $2M in revenue with just 1 customer support team member. Our agile, sprint-based approach enabled rapid iteration, optimizing everything from search (searchtap, boost) to retention (rise.ai, yotpo) and logistics (loop, Intuitive Shipping). The result? A scalable infrastructure capable of powering any dropship business at scale.
Creating UX that put customers first
Great design isn’t about perfection, it’s about understanding the customer’s needs. At Made Trade, we took a data-driven, user-first approach to UX and UI, continuously improving the site through A/B testing, heat mapping, direct customer feedback, and user testing.
Every sprint, we tested real user behavior, identifying friction points and making iterative improvements that enhanced navigation, streamlined checkout, and increased conversions. With a small, agile team, we focused on high-impact changes that ensured both first-time visitors and returning customers had a seamless, intuitive experience. By prioritizing customer insights over assumptions, we built a marketplace that was not just functional, but truly user-friendly.
Omni-channel growth marketing
Scaling Made Trade wasn’t just about having great products, it was about reaching the right customers at the right time. We built an omni-channel marketing strategy that spanned paid social, organic content, email, SEO, and strategic partnerships, ensuring we engaged customers across every touchpoint.
Through data-driven A/B testing and audience segmentation, we optimized ad performance, increased conversion rates, and grew brand awareness efficiently. Whether through high-performing Meta ads, automated Klaviyo email flows, or organic SEO rich content creation, our team maximized impact across channels, proving that with the right strategy, sustainable growth is scalable.
Email campaign examples
Static ad examples
Sustainable
Home Style Quiz
In 2024, we launched our Sustainable Home Style Quiz to better understand our customers’ aesthetic and style preferences. This interactive tool allowed us to deliver personalized, sustainable product recommendations tailored to each shopper’s style, enhancing the customer experience and driving engagement across our marketing channels.
By leveraging insights from the quiz responses, we refined our email, ad, and on-site personalization strategies, making sustainable shopping both seamless and inspiring.
Take the quiz and discover your perfect sustainable home style.
In-house studio photography that rivaled the biggest brands
From 2018 to 2024, we built and ran an in-house photo studio, capturing high-quality lifestyle imagery for our website, ads, and marketing campaigns. With a lean team of just three people we created visually compelling content that showcased the craftsmanship, materials, and stories behind every product.
By controlling our creative production, we maintained a strong, cohesive brand identity while keeping costs extremely low and proving that great imagery doesn’t require massive budgets, just the right vision and execution.
Photography examples
Our founder journey
& investor pitch deck
Made Trade began as a bold idea and grew into a venture-backed, tech-enabled marketplace redefining sustainable commerce. As founders, we built the company from the ground up, bootstrapping early on, and then successfully raising capital from investors who shared our vision.
Want a closer look at how we positioned Made Trade for growth?
