It all started with a harmless request: Could I help find a replacement quilt? The quilt in question was old, antique, vintage. I love vintage objects. I love fabric. Of course I couldn't say no!
Several years and many quilts later I found myself corresponding this week with the latest person I've met through a marketplace we could not have even imagined a decade ago. I bought a vintage quilt from her on EBay. It looked warm and toasty. I wasn't buying it to be a collectable - I just wanted to snuggle under it. And so I asked if she'd stitch it up in a few places before sending it off. She didn't mind at all.
And so over the past few weeks, she's sent me digital photos of fabric and answered my questions about what "homespun" and "tea stained" are. Talk about the intersection of the old and the new!
She sent me a few more digital snaps of the repair in progress and I selected some color choices from her suggestions. When Yahoo grew slow one day, she used her work email and it turns out she is a long-time employee at Hewlett Packard's group in Oregon. We talked a little tech then, too.
We don't know each other in the traditional sense, yet the 'impersonal' online buying experience has been incredibly personal and gratifying. And this isn't a unique situation.
I "met" a nice woman in Texas who knows an incredible amount about vintage fabric and finds amazing quilts and whose grandmother was a sort of master quilter.
And then there was the self-described grandmother in North Carolina whose daughter had recently lost a baby - and we emailed a few times about that. Sometimes random connections are so much easier to talk to, especially when the nominal topic is something cozy like a quilt.
I met someone in Tennessee whose Cherokee grandmother made one quilt I bought and I love knowing the story behind it. The family in Toronto didn't know about the modern crazy quilt, but they loved going to yard sales and flea markets and finding bright and pretty things.
There's a human connection in every aspect of commerce. The greatest fear of e-commerce was that we'd lose that human interaction. But the opposite is true. The people I meet through places like EBay have a passion for the things they are selling and they take the time to share it. Online sales, it seems, are driven by human connections more than even brick and mortar sales. The interjection of cold digital bits makes us emphasize our human touch.
The human inventiveness also makes markets for quirky products possible. I'm not sure how I'd have found that original replacement quilt in pre EBay days. And I certainly couldn't have researched quilts, the market for quilts, and how to ID the quilt I want in any other way.
Market-making is one of the great 'killer applications' of the web. It isn't about e-commerce technology or about putting up an online store. Those applications are just helper supporting ones to the main event: the marketplace itself.
Market-making is about connection building. It's about letting people with mutual interest intersect and from that intersection comes commerce, a natural by product of interaction. Market-making, it would seem, is a variation on community, and on those themes of sharing that we've touched on in previous weeks. It's one more form of saying 'see what I have? What do you have? What do we have?"
And that's something we've been doing since time immortal.
Without the web, I never would have discovered the passion (or it is the obsession?) for vintage quilts. And I never would have discovered all these wonderful stories and the people behind them. In an era of big box stores, it seems almost ironic that the antidote to their cold and impersonal real world is found in the virtual world and the digital box.
But, it is also once again a reminder that technology is simply a reflection of who and what we are - of humans seeking to connect with markets, products, and most importantly each other.
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