I'm Brian Williams. I built Fenfair because I needed it.

When I started, I pieced together a WordPress site with WooCommerce and a stack of addons that mostly fought each other. It was ugly. It was slow. Looking back, I can't believe I made sales on it at all. But the alternative was paying somebody five thousand dollars to build me a site I'd still have to maintain, so I duct-taped it together and figured it out as I went.

I opened the Etsy shop around the same time. Etsy was the discovery engine; my own site was the home base. That parallel setup is what kept the business alive when Etsy tried to end it.

In March 2026, Etsy put my shop on vacation mode. No warning. No email explaining why. I logged in one morning and the storefront was just off. For weeks I couldn't get a real human on support, only canned responses. I had no idea what was wrong.

A month later it turned out they wanted a new copy of my driver's license. That's it. One document. They never told me, never asked, just shut down the shop until I figured it out.

A full month with no Etsy income. For a family business, that hurts. The only reason it didn't end the whole business was firehelmetshields.com, my own site on infrastructure I owned, where Etsy's whims didn't apply.

I started digging after that. Forums, subreddits, Discord groups, Facebook communities. The same story shows up over and over: Etsy suspends a shop without notice, the seller spends weeks or months trying to reach a human, and meanwhile they have no income and no way to tell their buyers what's going on. For sellers without a backup channel, that's the end of the business. Not "a setback." Gone.

Handmade sellers shouldn't have a single point of failure they don't control. And they shouldn't have to become web developers to fix that.

Shopify is the obvious next stop. It's good infrastructure. But it isn't built for the way handmade sellers actually work.

Custom orders, quote, proof, deposit, balance, ship, aren't in the base Shopify product. To make that flow work, you stack apps. Custom-quote app. Deposit-payment app. Proof-approval app. Each one is $15-40 a month, none of them talk to each other, and you're the one stitching the seams.

Same story for lead-time display on product pages, production status timelines, custom variables on orders, buyer revision threads tied to the order: all the workflows handmade sellers use every day. On Shopify, every one of them is someone else's app. Add it up and you've spent $75-200 a month before you've sold anything, on capabilities that should have been in the box.

I built Fenfair because the shop I needed didn't exist. Custom orders are first-class: quote, proof, deposit, balance, ship, all in the core product. No add-on store. No glue code. The setup interview is plain-English questions about how your shop works, and you leave with a starter brand kit, a working storefront draft, and your first product or quote draft in about fifteen minutes.

Pricing is one flat plan: $37/month, $370/year, zero Fenfair transaction fees. You pay Stripe's standard processing rate on sales, same as everyone else does, and that's it. No marketplace cut. No paid placement. No algorithm deciding whether buyers find you.

You can draft your whole shop in free build mode before you pay anything. The 14-day trial doesn't start when you create the account. It starts when you actually turn on the live business features (publishing, custom domain, real checkout). That way you have time to look around and decide.

Handmade sellers come first, over corporate profits. That isn't a marketing line for me. I'm still running firehelmetshields.com. I'm still selling on Etsy. I built Fenfair on the same infrastructure my own business depends on, with the workflows my own business actually uses, because I'm the first customer.

If Fenfair fails handmade sellers, I'll know, because it'll be failing me.