Made In Baltimore
“I'm an urban planner by profession and through my work as an urban planner for the city of Baltimore developed the Made in Baltimore program. So I would say that my craft is an economic development community organization. I’m also interested in all of the different types of activities that our, our member businesses do for their work. I do have a background as an artist, and through that work have done a good, fair amount of carpentry and screen printing and other types of things that a lot of our members do as well,” says Andy Cook, Founder and CEO of the Made in Baltimore organization.
Courtesy of Made in Baltimore
Andy Cook started an organization that was much needed for Baltimore. Baltimore continues to have a bad rep whenever you hear about it on the news but Baltimore is a community of makers, entrepreneurs, and craftspeople that lift up the heart and soul of the city.
“I came up with the idea for a local brand initiative in Baltimore, that's kind of the term of art for what we do here, Made in Baltimore wasn't the first local brand initiative. There are others and other cities around the country, I looked a lot towards examples in San Francisco, in New York, San Francisco made and made in NYC were programs that started before us. Also, guidance from a national organization called the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, which was kind of not exactly an umbrella organization for all of these different local brands, but they host an annual conference for people doing this type of work, supporting urban manufacturing. It was at one of their conferences in 2014, that I learned about this type of activity and thought, yeah, there's nobody doing this in Baltimore City, somebody probably should,” says Andy.
Kristan asked Andy more about the program and how it has supported the local makers.
“We don't actually curate. So the core of the program is a business certification. So if you're a business that's making a physical product in Baltimore City, you can get this certification, it's free, you apply on our website, and we just verify those two things, your business and you're making a physical product. Once those are verified, the business receives a certification, then they're what we call a member, they're in the Made in Baltimore network. So we currently stand at around 285 businesses in the network. Right now we're growing at a rate of about 10 a month. So that's really great. Early on, it was definitely a challenge, trying it, you know, gaining interest, getting recognition for the program, but we had a few things going in our favor. I was working at the time for the Baltimore City Department of Planning as an urban planner. So we had the reach of the city, that lent some oomph. So that was helpful just to broadcast that the program existed because it was a city program. We got some local media attention when it was launched. I should add that we've since moved from the planning department to the Baltimore Development Corporation, which is our city's Economic Development Agency. We got some local media attention when it was launched. I should add that we've since moved from the planning department to the bottom and Development Corporation, which is our city's Economic Development Agency. But we started it off with a splash event. We ran a pop-up store. When I say we, at the time I was doing this in partnership with the kind of early stages of a self-organized maker community called the Industrial Arts Collective (IAC) for short. I see was really kind of forming around the maker spaces that were starting to pop up in Baltimore, including Baltimore Clayworks and Baltimore Underground Science Center, as well as a few of the craftspeople that were working out of those spaces. So they were organizing in the attempt to figure out could these groups work together more purposefully. And, you know, by participating in those meetings, I started meeting folks that were doing this kind of activity. The idea of a pop-up store just kind of emerged, there was a grant available from the city of Baltimore from the Creative Baltimore Fund that we applied for and received, which funded this first pop-up shop that we did in the summer of 2015.
The idea being can we create a platform for all these local makers, just to kind of show the city who these companies were and gather them all in one place to make it easy to find, we really didn't know, you know, how many we'd find in that in that process. We put out a call for vendors and you know, an application online, and we actually got about 80 businesses to participate in, pop-up. So that ran for two months in the art gallery on North Avenue in the station. We had a lot of people come out, we did a number of events during the run of the store. We surveyed everyone at the end to ask them, would you be interested in more events like this? Would you be interested in a certification? Because I had heard about that through the urban manufacturing lines. Yes, I was kind of testing the waters with that survey to find out if businesses would want to participate. By and large, it was a resounding yes. So we continue to push towards making this an official program,” says Andy.
Kristan also learned more about future initiatives the Made in Baltimore program is working towards and some of the members that are a part of the program that will also be included in this series including 228 Grant Street Co., Imperium Shaving, and much more. To learn more about the Made in Baltimore program, listen to the podcast episode above or on any podcast channel to your liking.
View Sarah’s website here: https://madeinbaltimore.org/