About
A door, and a reason to stay
Phyrne is a small company with one idea. Selling your work should not cost you the company of other people who make things — and the company of other people who make things is worth more than any feed has ever paid for it.
Where it started
Two studios, one corridor, and nobody selling anything
The building this began in had eleven studios on a corridor. A printmaker, a luthier, two photographers, a woman who welded. They borrowed each other's tools daily and had almost no idea what each other charged, who each other's buyers were, or which of them was about to give up.
Online it was the opposite. Everyone could sell to strangers and nobody had a corridor. So we built the corridor, and put a counter at the end of it.
How it pays for itself
The counter funds the corridor
Phyrne takes 8% of what its members sell, and that is the only money in the building. No ads, no data, no paid placement, no investor asking why engagement is flat on a Tuesday.
It has a useful consequence. We are paid when a member is paid, so the only thing worth building is whatever helps a member get paid — or keeps the room they get paid in worth being in.
What it is not
Three things we have decided against
Every one of these would make the numbers better this quarter, and every one of them would make the room worse.
Not a marketplace
Nobody bids for the top of a page here. The shop and its search list every open storefront in the order the words match, never the order anybody paid, and every result opens on the member's own storefront, not on ours.
Not a feed
Nothing here rewards posting. The club has a call board and a calendar, not an endless scroll with your work in it and somebody else's advertising beside it.
Not an ad business
We sell nothing about you to anybody. The 8% is the business model, written down in one line so it cannot quietly become something else.
Where we are
Five cities to start, then wherever the members are
Storefronts pay out in sixteen countries from day one: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and twelve more across Europe. Gatherings need a room, a host and enough members to fill it, so those started where we could walk in the door ourselves.
Savannah
Where the corridor was. Ceramics, printmaking, textiles, and a college's worth of people who stayed.
Charleston
Photographers, furniture, food, and the shortest drive to the first supper we ever hosted.
Atlanta
Music, film and post-production. The busiest call board in the club, by a distance.
Brooklyn
Bands, illustrators, zines. Where the phrase "a guitarist, Thursdays" came from.
Austin
Players, producers and venues, and more members with two crafts than anywhere else.
Everywhere else
Apply from any city. A storefront works today in any of the sixteen countries we pay out in; a gathering happens when there are enough of you to fill a room.
The rules of the house
A room is only as good as who is let into it
I asked what the catch was for about a month. There is no catch. They take eight per cent and they read your application properly, and both of those things turn out to be the product.
Come and look at the corridor
Tell us what you make and what you came for. A person reads it, and we answer either way.