About Sister's
Sister's is a deliberate Vermont pilot with a 10% take rate and no algorithm in the back.
Why Sister's exists
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 Vermont 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.
I grew up here. I spent my twenties in San Diego and a few other American cities, and the longer I was away the more I understood what Vermont taught me. I'm moving back to Underhill in June 2026 because I miss those values, and because it hurts that friends I've made later in life never got to grow up inside of them. I spent a decade learning how to build things on the internet. I'm bringing those skills back to the people who raised me.
Sister's takes 10% of product sales. Zero on shipping. I'll never take more. This pilot will not be sold to a bigger marketplace, take venture capital, or run a sponsored product placement. If the math stops working, I close the doors before I sell out the sellers who trusted me.
That's the whole pitch.
The 10%
What the 10% actually pays for
At pilot 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 Vermont seasonal guides from local illustrators
- My 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, I'm paying myself less than minimum wage. I'm 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 pilot, not a movement. But you should know where I stand, because being neutral has not worked out for sellers or for Vermont.
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
My name is Eloise. Ellie if you know me.
I 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 my childhood and it shaped what I think a human life should feel like.
I left in my twenties and watched the rest of the country become fast fashion and standardized everything. Plastic items I recognize from someone else's house in a different state, marketed to me as "curated." Uniqueness is what makes us human. Sameness is what makes us a market segment.
Sister's is the Vermont-first pilot I want to exist when I move back home.
If you want to sell on Sister's, apply here. Questions go to hello@sisters.delivery. If you think I'm full of it, write me about that too. I read every email.
Ellie
Underhill, Vermont