Locally Made NE
Markets and Makers Directory

David started a database of the North East's farmers' markets, makers, event organisers and venues many years ago, and kept building it. Later, Oliwer, a data scientist, heard about the project at an event and joined in, helping take it to the next level. It was a brilliant resource with nowhere public to live. Locally Made NE is the idea of turning it into a website anyone can use, with no account and no log-in to start with, so people can find what's on near them and find the people making and growing the food.

We were asked to get involved, and as we're all about backing local businesses, we couldn't say no.

The home page opens on drone footage of the North East, with a hero that travels between the landscape and the markets themselves, from Stonehaven to Torphins to Fraserburgh. Below it sits a live map with a pin for each market, from the Angus coast to the Moray Firth.

The look is a dark, confident night-market style with big condensed headlines, so a farmers' market directory feels more like an event guide than a council noticeboard. The drone footage is shared with the kind permission of Camp Cook Explore.

Tyler from our team designed the Locally Made badge. It's a round, hand-lettered mark: a ring of people around a stretch of coastline, with wheat, a bottle, cheese, a paintbrush, a bowl and a reel of thread in the foreground. It says everything about the project at a glance, food and craft made close to home by real people.

The website's palette picks up those colours. A deep near-black ground lets the photography and the logo do the talking, warm cream carries the text, sea blue and leaf green highlight links and buttons, and a bright orange marks every pin on the map.

The What's On page lists every market in the next seven days, with times, venues and stall numbers, and a search box for a market, town or venue. It updates from the database, so it stays current without anyone editing pages by hand.

Behind that sits the directory: makers, organisers and venues, each with a profile that links through to the others. An organiser's page shows their upcoming and past events, and a venue's page shows what's held there. Only public details are ever shown, and contact details are never published.

In phase one, makers can register, edit or remove their own listing at no cost, and organisers can post their own markets and events. Every request is checked to make sure it comes from the business itself. A short story section sets out why local food matters, and a Getting Found page gives makers quick fixes for showing up online.

Locally Made is being built in phases. Phase one is live now and open to everyone: anyone can use the site, and anyone running a market or an event can post it. That gets the whole network visible and easy to find while the next stage takes shape.

Next, we're working towards a fuller platform, closer to a CRM, with different access for different types of user. At that point, detailed access to the database and full records will be for paid users, while some listings and records stay open to the public. Because we manage the site and the database together, the foundations are already in place.

We manage the development, the hosting, the site and the database, so the data and the website always move together. Each page has its own title, description and structured data so search engines can read it properly, and the site has a sitemap and tidy redirects from its older addresses.

Alongside the build, our founder Darren and Tyler from the team look after the project's social media and business growth, helping more makers and markets hear about it.

Phase one is live and open to everyone at locally-made.co.uk, sitting on a network of 520+ artisans, 330+ food producers, 60+ drinks producers and 45+ farm-gate markets. It turns years of careful database work into something anyone in the North East can open on their phone and use today, and it lays the groundwork for the paid platform to come.