Earlier in the year we were pleased to support the shop run by Created in Birmingham set up to showcase the work of local artists, musicians, writers, jewellery designers, badge makers, photographers, zine editors, etc – and a roaring success it was, turning over £45,000 in the three months it was operating for.
The ever-inspirational Pete Ashton has started the process rolling to see about setting up a new shop – with an initial goal of getting it up and running by October (or maybe November) ready for Christmas trading, but also seeing about getting the shop on a sustainable footing with an aim of being a permanent feature on the landscape.
Clearly it’s early days yet – decisions must be made about whether the new shop will be a moving pop-up shop, a fixed shop (whether in the city centre or outside it), whether it would seek to be ultimately rent-paying rather than relying on the generosity of funders or landlords, whether it will be predominantly online or bricks and mortar, etc.
In my view, what’s more important for the long term is getting the structure of the people involved in the thing correct first before getting too bogged down in decisions about what physical form the shop will take – then the organisation can adapt to changing circumstances with a solid foundation to underpin it.
One thing which seems to be agreed on is that for it to work, it needs to be set up on some form of organisational lines rather than one or two individuals carrying all the burden; at the meeting to discuss it, some kind of ‘artists’ collective’ was agreed upon. This could be formalised in a number of ways – as a Consumers’ Co-Operative (although the members in this case would actually be the designer-makers rather than the customers), a Community Development Trust, a Community Interest Company, a Limited Company, a Registered Charity, or perhaps other models, all with their attendant advantages and disadvantages.
More importantly than the legal structure is the social structure – how the people who’ll actually be running it will fit together. I think the mind-map model, as adopted by Rhubarb Radio, would be the best way to do it.
Any organisation like this needs to have a ‘benevolent dictator’ at the centre – somebody who is ultimately responsible, so somebody who has the final say. That person, like everybody else in the structure, can have as much or as little involvement in day-to-day running as they feel able to give; the core team leader team (which could be supplemented by general ’board members without portfolio’ in order to help maintain an overview of the organisation as it operates) would have their regular meetings together, team leaders would have regular meetings with their individual teams, and there could be full members meetings less regularly. And by ‘meeting’, that doesn’t necessarily always need to be a bunch of people getting together in a room – this is, after all, the modern era of the internets!
Part of the point of having a structure like this is (despite its apparent complexity, looking at the picture) its agility – people can move in and out of the structure with relative ease, with resilience built in by virtue of nobody having the monopoly on knowledge, so where gaps appear, plugging them temporarily or permanently shouldn’t be too hard. And each role on the structure doesn’t necessarily have to be filled by a separate person – any individual could have multiple roles within the chart.
The list of roles I outline for the shop is just one possible list – almost certainly there will be things which wouldn’t be needed which could be dispensed with or combined with other roles (for example, there’s clear overlap between supplier liaison, product merchandising, and shop management), and almost certainly there will be other roles needed which aren’t on there. But it’s a start, and you can’t design an organisation until you’ve started it!
Whatever happens, we wish the new Created in Birmingham shop every success, and look forward to being a part of it again!
Update – Pete has posted the summary of the discussion at the public meeting.