The time has come again! SFMade Week is May 4th-10th, and we want your participation! For those of you that don’t know, SFMade Week features seven days of education, exploration, and innovation, designed to celebrate and heighten local awareness and understanding of the local manufacturing sector and the companies and people who bring locally made products to fruition.
In other words, May is when we turn up! This is our biggest event of the year and as an SFMade member, your biggest opportunity to leverage the SFMade brand.
HOW TO GET INVOLVED:
1. PLAN AN EVENT
There will be four types of events happening during SFMade Week:
-Factory Tours/Open Studios- Public is invited to the factory to see production process, meet workers/owner, and do tastings if appropriate.
-Workshops/Classes- Public is invited to learn a specific skill or trade taught by member business.
-Sales- A member has a sale and an event to celebrate it.
-Pop-Up Shop- A member hosts a special “pop-up shop” with other SFMade member products.
All Factory Tours will charge $5 and tickets will benefit SFMade. This helps us to guarantee attendees show up. If a member feels the need to charge more for a workshop (in which you are using materials that will incur costs to you), you can do that on your own registration site, which we will link to. Sales events and pop-up shops should obviously not charge for entrance.
Makerhoods: We would ideally like to draw attention to neighborhoods in the city where clusters of SFMade members are, these are called Makerhoods! In order for a neighborhood to be considered a Makerhood, there needs to be a significant number of events happening in that neighborhood around the same time during SFMade Week. We will be contacting member volunteers in each neighborhood who will serve as a coordinator, BUT you can make it easier to organize events on the same day by studying the google doc to see if other members in your neighborhood have listed dates they are willing to do events—and then schedule yours accordingly. If you are the community-driven super-star willing to coordinate events in your neighborhood you can indicate that in the google doc.
2. APPLY TO PARTICIPATE IN RAMP IT UP! May 7th at ShopFloor Design Factory and Harmonic Brewing. 6-9 PM.
Ramp it Up! is the manufacturing sector’s biggest networking event of the year, bringing in 500 stakeholders, funders, and friends of SFMade. This year it’s our 5th anniversary and the theme is “Let’s Get Together” in celebration of the community of manufactures we’ve seen grow since our founding and the unique ways they come together to make the sector even more dynamic. Which means that at the event we’ll be featuring SFMade members who have collaborated. So, if you have worked with another manufacturer to produce a product, have an idea for a booth that combines two or more SFMade member products, or have somehow collaborated to support each other (shared space for example), you can apply to be an exhibitor/vendor at the event. Here are some examples we’ve seen: Etta and Billie’s Earl Grey soap made with T-We Tea, Beer floats with humphry slocombe ice cream and Anchor beer, screen-printed shirts by Headline with blanks from Globia Designs, Nana Joe’s Granola bags made by Rickshaw, Galanter & Jones and Capital Eyewear sharing studio space… and the list goes on! We’ll be selecting companies based on originality and industry (as to avoid having too many products in the same industry).
TO PLAN AN EVENT or APPLY TO RAMP IT UP!
Please fill out this google doc by Friday, March 27th. There are two tabs at the bottom of the sheet, one for SFMade Week and another for Ramp It Up! Our SFMade Week website will launch March 20th, so the sooner you plan your event the longer we have to promote it. Once we have your information we will contact you to confirm your event.
Questions? Email [email protected].