Back in 2007, two years after completing a renovation of an 1870s brownstone in which we used a number of salvaged windows and doors, we had an idea: wouldn't it be cool to bring together a bunch of dealers in old house parts together in one place so our Brooklyn neighbors see that it was possible to source and reuse these beautiful pieces of history. So in September of that year, in a school yard in Clinton Hill, we staged Salvagefest. (You can see the photos on Flickr, another relic of that period.) The event went great, so great in fact that it gave us the confidence to launch the Brooklyn Flea the following year, an institution that, 17 years later, is still thriving as a centerpiece of the Brooklyn vintage and handmade community. (In 2020, we'd also take over operation of the legendary flea market in Chelsea.)
Since that Saturday in September of 2007, however, not a year has gone by when we haven't revisited the idea of creating a centralized way to evangelize for, and help dealers sell, architectural salvage. The problem was, as we saw it at least, it was extremely expensive to create a multivendor marketplace. As the years rolled by, and the failings of eBay, Etsy and Facebook Marketplace as purveyors of historical items became clear, we kept dreaming of being able to create a site that would be made specifically for historical artifacts, free of all the "noise" of handmade objects, in the case of Etsy, and all crappy new doors, in the case of eBay. It also became clear that we would need to address the pain point facing most dealers wanting to move their collection online: the amount of time and expertise required to upload an item.
Finally, after two decades of wanting to create a solution to this problem, opportunity presented itself in the form of AI, which not only had radically lowered the cost of building a marketplace website but had made possible the automation of the uploading of inventory, from photo identification to categorization to item description. The result is the website you see here, along with its companion DIGGABLE AI app, currently available in the Apple app store. The app lets you upload up to five photos of an item and within seconds categorizes and describes the item; after you manually have the option to add a price and dimensions, you can upload it to your shop on Diggable.com, where you effectively have both a private inventory management system and the option to post any of your items in the public marketplace.
These services are, and always will, be free. OUR MISSION IS TO AGGREGATE AS MUCH OF THE ARCHITECTURAL SALVAGE AND ANTIQUES AROUND THE WORLD INTO ONE PLACE. At some point, should the site catch on, we will find some ways to make money on the margins by allowing dealers to pay for premium placement and that sort of thing, but if we can stay lean as an organization we can get by on that. In the meantime, we'll be writing articles about the industry--news events, dealer profiles, history lessons, etc.--and in general trying to build community.
No doubt people will have plenty of quibbles over little things as we get underway but this will be a work in progress for some time to come, a work that we hope members of the community will feel free to give us (polite!) feedback on by emailing info@diggable.com. So, please, have at it!
Jonathan Butler
Founder, Diggable.com