Ethos

The Office Chair Empire That Wasn't

In the early 2010s, a friend of mine built a thriving business selling office chairs on Amazon. He became one of the platform's largest sellers, with thousands of happy customers and steady growth.

Then Amazon struck. They traced his supply chain, sourced the same chairs from his manufacturer, and launched them under Amazon Basics at a price lower than his cost. Overnight, his business disappeared. Years of work, customer trust, and expertise were wiped out by a platform that could copy what worked and crush the original creator.

This is not just his story. It is the story of commerce today, where platforms hold the power and businesses fight to survive inside systems designed to extract more than they give.

Marketplace Feudalism

Modern marketplaces create a kind of digital feudalism. Independent businesses compete desperately against one another while the platforms they depend on face no real competition at all. Sellers cannot simply move. Shifting from Amazon to eBay or from Shopify to another provider means starting over, losing reviews, retraining algorithms, and abandoning years of optimization.

The result is an ecosystem where rules change overnight, fees rise without warning, and even your best ideas can be copied by the very platform you rely on. Businesses look like owners but operate more like tenants, paying rent in the form of data, fees, and dependence.

Building a Decentralized Marketplace

At Openship, we are creating open source software as a service platforms for every vertical, from hotels to grocery stores to barbershops. Together, these vertical platforms form the foundation of a decentralized marketplace, where businesses fully own their storefronts and customer relationships.

Instead of bending to centralized platforms, businesses can participate in a network where each store remains independent but interoperable. Instead of adapting your business to fit marketplace requirements, you flip the script: marketplaces adapt to you. Your store becomes the single source of truth, syncing automatically across every channel while you maintain complete control. The more businesses that join, the stronger the network becomes, without a single gatekeeper deciding who succeeds or fails.

Software That Fits Your Business

For too long, businesses shaped themselves around rigid, one size fits all software. They spent countless hours configuring dashboards and workarounds, trying to fit unique needs into generic molds. That era is ending.

Modern development makes it possible to create personal software, tools that adapt to the business rather than the other way around. This is not about turning everyone into developers. It is about making commerce infrastructure flexible enough that businesses can shape it to their exact needs. Instead of clicking through endless dashboards, you can simply tell your AI assistant what you need: "Create a product for the European market" or "Route this order to our best supplier."

Built for Independence

This is why we built infrastructure that you can truly own. With Openship and Openfront, your store is your system, your code, your data. If we disappear tomorrow, your business keeps running because the tools are open and under your control.

Ownership means freedom. Freedom to modify, freedom to expand, freedom to evolve without permission. It also means security, knowing that no one can change the rules on you, raise fees, or take your customers away. Every platform includes a built-in AI assistant that understands your business completely, and because you own the platform, you have the choice to use our built-in assistant, Claude, ChatGPT, or any AI that can connect to MCP servers.

The Path Forward

The office chair story doesn't have to be yours. Deploy our platforms and flip the script: instead of adapting your business to fit marketplace requirements, make marketplaces adapt to you. Manage everything from your Openfront store while automatically syncing across every channel. Build direct partnerships with other businesses through decentralized networks where no middleman extracts fees or controls the relationship. Never again worry that a platform will change the rules, raise fees, or copy your best ideas. Openfront and Openship: using open source to disrupt marketplaces.