About Sister's
Sister's is a deliberate local marketplace with a 10% take rate and no algorithm in the back.
About Sister's
Sister's is a community marketplace built to make it easier to buy from the people who live and work around you.
We grew up in a place where buying food, gifts, flowers, honey, bread, and vegetables directly from local growers and family businesses wasn't a trend. It was simply how things worked. You knew who made what you bought. You saw your neighbors at the greenmarket. Money stayed in the community.
Over time, convenience won.
Today, most of us can have almost anything delivered to our door in a day or two, but finding something made nearby often takes more effort than it should. Greenmarkets are wonderful, but they're only open certain hours. Small businesses rely on word of mouth. Many talented makers never have the time or resources to build an online store.
Sister's exists to bridge that gap.
We're building a place where local growers, bakers, artists, makers, farmers, and small businesses can reach more customers without giving up a huge percentage of every sale. A place where shoppers can discover what's being made nearby and support the people behind it.
We believe local economies are stronger when neighbors buy from neighbors. We believe small businesses deserve simple, affordable tools to sell online. And we believe communities become more resilient when more dollars stay close to home.
For sellers, Sister's is a way to reach customers beyond a Saturday market or a storefront. For shoppers, it's a way to discover thoughtful products, support local businesses, and bring a little more connection back into everyday purchases.
We're starting in Brooklyn, the place that taught us these values in the first place.
Thank you for being here.
Why we're different
Most marketplaces would rather you not see how they make money. Etsy is now full of dropshippers and resold mass production. Amazon Handmade is a marketing phrase. Faire is wholesale-only and unhelpful to a local baker selling six loaves on a Saturday. Instagram is an algorithm that decides whether your favorite ceramicist gets to eat this month.
Sister's is starting somewhere more specific.
Sister's takes 10% of product sales. Zero on shipping. We'll never take more. Sister's will not be sold to a bigger marketplace, take venture capital, or run a sponsored product placement. If the math stops working, we close the doors before we sell out the sellers who trusted us.
That's the whole pitch.
The 10%
What the 10% actually pays for
At this scale, 10% of Sister's revenue is a small number. Here is where it goes:
- Hosting and tools (Vercel, Supabase, Resend, Stripe processing): roughly $20 a month
- Domain and email forwarding: roughly $1 a month
- Marketing, photography, and commissioning free seasonal guides from local illustrators
- Our time running applications, onboarding sellers, writing emails, fixing things, running the storefront
- Quarterly donations to Migrant Justice, the Vermont organization that built the Milk with Dignity program for dairy farmworker wages and housing
At this scale, after expenses, we're paying ourselves less than minimum wage. We're okay with that for the first year because that's how new things start. The 10% take rate is the same for every seller. No surprise fees, no priority placements, no offsite-ad markup.
What Sister's is against
Sister's is a marketplace, not a movement. But you should know where we stand, because being neutral has not worked out for sellers.
Sister's is against:
- Marketplaces that take 30% and call it visibility
- Recommendation algorithms that decide which sellers get seen
- Dropshippers pretending to be artisans
- "Locally inspired" goods made in China and rebranded
- Plastic packaging by default
- Fast-everything
Sister's is for:
- People who actually make the thing they sell
- Slow goods, even when it's inconvenient
- Compostable shipping, even when it costs more
- Paying people fairly, even when it costs us
- A 10% take rate shown on every product page
Founder note
We're Ellie and Lillian. Sisters, co-founders, and the people behind Sister's.
We grew up in a place where family and community made things by hand and gave them to each other. Quilts, jam, bread, ceramics, dried flowers, ink drawings. Things with no resale value and infinite meaning. That was the texture of our childhood and it shaped what we think a human life should feel like.
We left for a while and watched the rest of the country become fast fashion and standardized everything. Plastic items we recognize from someone else's house in a different state, marketed to us as "curated." Uniqueness is what makes us human. Sameness is what makes us a market segment.
Sister's is the local marketplace we want to exist where we're from.
Questions go to hello@sisters.delivery. If you think we're full of it, write us about that too. We read every email.
Ellie & Lillian Stout
Co-founders, Sister's