Why one person in Lake Country decided to stop waiting for someone else to build this.
"I didn't set out to build a platform. I set out to find better food for my family, and kept hitting dead ends."
A few years ago, my health forced me to slow down in ways I wasn't prepared for. When you're suddenly paying close attention to what you eat, what you put on your body, and what you bring into your home, you start noticing things you'd overlooked for years. One of the biggest things I noticed was how hard it had become to find local, trustworthy sources for the basics, food, goods, everyday products made by people I could actually know.
I live in Lake Country. We're surrounded by farms, home producers, small makers, and families who grow and create incredible things. And yet I kept finding myself at big-box stores buying food shipped from thousands of miles away, with no idea where it actually came from or how it was made. Not because I wanted to, but because I didn't know where else to go.
"The farms and the families were here all along. They just had no way to reach me, and I had no easy way to find them."
When I started looking harder, I found them. A family raising pasture-raised eggs a few miles away. A woman making small-batch honey in Delafield. A baker in Hartland selling sourdough out of her home kitchen on Tuesday mornings. They were all around me, posting in Facebook groups, selling at occasional markets, relying on word of mouth. Doing incredible work with almost no visibility.
That's when the gap became clear to me. It wasn't a lack of local producers. It was a lack of infrastructure, a simple, reliable place where people looking for local goods could find the people making them, and where small producers could be discovered without spending money on marketing they couldn't afford.
Mercantile Local is my answer to that gap. It's not complicated. It's a map and a directory for Lake Country, a place where local farms, artisans, makers, and producers can be found by the neighbors who are looking for them.
I built this because I believe that what we buy, and who we buy it from, matters. Not in a preachy way, just in a practical one. Money spent at a local farm stays in the community. Food grown nearby is fresher, often safer, and comes with a story you can actually know. Products made by hand by a neighbor carry a different kind of value than something manufactured overseas and shipped to a warehouse.
I also built it because I wanted it for myself. I wanted one place to go when I'm looking for eggs, or honey, or a handmade candle, or someone who makes real bread. I wanted to stop relying on luck and Facebook scrolling and word of mouth. I wanted a map.
So I built one. And I'm opening it up to everyone in Lake Country who wants the same thing.
If you're a producer, a farmer, a baker, a maker, a grower, a basic listing is always free. This platform exists to give local producers visibility, and that will not change. If you're a buyer, browsing is always free. Founding members get early access to premium features as they launch. And if you're someone who just believes local communities are worth investing in, I hope you'll share it with a neighbor.
We're just getting started. But the community is already here.