From a Maryland dairy barn to downtown Frederick, Sweet Clover built a business around vintage finds, mixed styles and a reason to come back next month.
The Santa Monica company spent decades doing the expensive, unglamorous work that online marketplaces usually push onto sellers. Its lesson is not simply to cut out the middleman - it is to replace the useful parts of the middleman without swallowing the maker's margin.
Long before Amazon reached India, three brothers in Delhi were mailing hand-cast bronzes and out-of-print Sanskrit texts to strangers overseas. Twenty-five years on, Exotic India still pays its 10,000 artisans upfront - and ships to roughly 160 countries.