Creative / Designer, Co-founder of
Hemetic Trading Co. & Stage Design Group
Based in Burlington, VT
Content and Digital Marketing Strategy / PR & Social Media Marketing Consultant Based in Burlington, VT
When owner of Jskis and 4frnt Jason Levinthal was contacted by his friend, owner of Hestra Outdoors and designer at Ideology Design - Aaron Ambusky, explaining that they received a request from a hospital in Rutland VT wanting to order 500 units of medical protective face shields. He did not have the capability to produce that quantity and was hoping to find someone that could be of assistance to supply the hospital in need.
Through the powers of social media Jason re-shared Aaron's call for help and received an overwhelming number of people wanting to help, but all responded with more questions than answers. They wanted to know which hospitals need what? Where to get the materials? What instructions to follow? What machines could be used?
The next morning when Jason's friend Vin Farci (owner of Whiteroom Custom Skis and works as a Certified Athletic Trainer at Copley hospital in Morrisville, VT ) saw the post he suggested a digital platform to connect the makers with medical professionals to get them products faster and enable makers to share their knowledge.
Twenty four hours later Jason launched a very rough version of this website and received an overwhelming enthusiastic response from people eager to post their designs and products they were already making.
While all this was happening, Burlington based designer, Jake Caggige was simultaneously working on designing a developing a site with the same goal that he built out using a combination of design on Webflow & Sharetribe platform. Jake learned through social media from his business parter at Hemetic Trading co. & Stage Design Group Matt McGunnis about what Jason was working on and immediately sent Jason a message that they needed to connect.
Jason and Jake agreed to collaborate utilizing Jason's experience, feedback and network in combination with Jake's design thinking and execution in an effort to dramatically improve the existing platform and a week later after many late nights they tweaked, re-worked, refined, and re-launched this site MakerExchange.org.
THANK YOU FOR HELPING SPREAD THE WORD!
To beat Covid-19 the world needs to collaborate like never before. Please email us suggestions for improving this platform and info about hospitals in need as well as makers with products, designs and materials to share: info@makerexchange.org