The Office Chair Empire That Wasn't

In the early 2010s, my friend built a thriving business selling office chairs on Amazon. He wasn't just another seller. He was one of the biggest office chair retailers on the platform, with thousands of satisfied customers and steady growth year after year.

Then Amazon struck.

They tracked his supply chain, found his manufacturer in China, negotiated better terms than he could ever get, and launched the exact same chairs under Amazon Basics at 30% less than his cost. Overnight, his business evaporated. Years of relationship-building, customer reviews, and market knowledge were rendered worthless by a platform that could simply copy what worked and crush the original creator.

This isn't a story about one unlucky seller. This is the story of commerce in 2025: a feudal system where individual businesses compete desperately with each other while the lords of the digital manor extract wealth from every transaction, relationship, and innovation.

The Problem: Marketplace Feudalism

Today's commerce landscape has a fundamental imbalance. Individual businesses compete intensely with each other, while the marketplaces they rely on have captured the lion's share of market control.

Sellers face brutal competition, but marketplaces have almost none.

Sellers are trapped.

Switching from Amazon to eBay means rebuilding your entire operation: losing your reviews, starting over with algorithms, and abandoning years of optimization. The marketplaces know this, so they can raise fees, change rules overnight, and copy your best products without consequence.

The result? A commerce ecosystem designed to extract value from businesses rather than empower them. Sellers become more like franchisees than independent businesses. Every transaction, every customer relationship, every piece of data flows through and strengthens someone else's empire while the actual creators of value struggle for scraps.

The Shift: Software That Fits Your Business

We're in the middle of a quiet revolution. For years, businesses have bent over backward to fit rigid, one-size-fits-all software by tweaking endless settings and accepting "good enough."

That era is over.

Modern development makes it possible to create personal software: tools you can shape to fit your business like a glove. No more endless configurations. You can modify the software itself to work exactly how you need.

This isn't about turning everyone into coders. It's about giving you tools that adapt to you, not the other way around.

Our Solution: Commerce You Own, Built for Your Industry

We're creating commerce tools tailored to specific industries. This is software you can customize at the source and truly own.

Designed for Your World

Forget generic platforms that force you to adapt. Our tools are built for your industry's unique needs:

Restaurants: Table management, kitchen workflows, and meal customization
Automotive: Parts compatibility, service scheduling, and warranty tracking
Healthcare: Appointment booking, patient records, and insurance processing
Fitness: Class scheduling, memberships, and equipment tracking

Each solution shares core commerce features but feels like it was made just for you.

Built for Ownership, Not Rental

When you use our platforms, you're not just getting access. You're getting ownership:

Full source code to modify anything to match your workflow
Clean, modern architecture that's straightforward to customize
No strings attached: no monthly fees, no feature gates, no artificial limits

This is the fundamental shift: from renting someone else's vision of what your business needs to owning software that evolves with you.

The Network Effect: Building Marketplaces from the Ground Up

Most people think you have to choose: build a marketplace or build seller tools. We do both.

Here's how it works:

Sellers get industry-specific platforms they fully control
Multi-channel freedom lets them sell anywhere while keeping independence
Shared infrastructure creates natural connection points between sellers
Organic marketplaces emerge from networks of independent businesses

Unlike Traditional SaaS

Shopify gives you a store and hopes you'll stay forever, paying monthly fees for features you can't customize. We give you the entire commerce infrastructure and the ability to modify it however you want.

The difference is simple: We succeed when you're independent, not dependent.

True Independence Through Open Source

Our platforms are built for permanence:

100% open source: no vendor lock-in, no surprise changes
Self-hostable: run it anywhere, own your data completely
Standards-based: connect any payment processor, shipping service, or tool
Built to last: using technologies that will outlive any company or trend

Open source means your business tools work forever, regardless of what happens to us.

The Future We're Building

We envision a world where:

Every business owns its commerce infrastructure
Software molds to your needs, not vice versa
Marketplaces grow from communities of independent sellers
No one settles for "close enough" when they can have exactly right

Your Path to Commerce Independence

The office chair story doesn't have to be yours. Here's how to take control:

Pick your platform: Start with tools built for your specific industry
Make it yours: Modify the source code to match your exact workflow
Connect strategically: Use existing marketplaces while building direct relationships
Scale freely: Grow into your own marketplace when ready, using infrastructure you own

This isn't about disrupting e-commerce. It's about democratizing it. Giving every business the power to own, shape, and control their digital commerce destiny.

The future of commerce is owned, not rented. Personal, not generic. Open, not closed.

Openfront and Openship: Full-stack commerce infrastructure you own, customize, and command.

Ethos