The MarketplAce for Aro and Ace-owned small businesses

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone, welcome back. My name is Courtney, I’m here with my spouse Royce and together we are The Ace Couple. And today’s just gonna be a short little breezy check-in episode. If this is already information that you are fully familiar with, feel free to check in with us next week. But we’ve gotten a handful of questions recently about our marketplace for Aro and Ace small business owners. And we’re going to address some of those questions, especially for some of you who might be newer around here. Obviously, if you’ve listened to any of our episodes all the way through, you know that we like to end with a featured marketplace vendor. So let’s talk about that. What is it? What isn’t it?

Royce: How long have we been doing featured marketplace vendors? It looks like that started on episode 127 back in February of 2024, almost two years then.

Courtney: Almost two years then. We originally started the marketplace for, I guess, a handful of different reasons. There was a time I was trying very hard to find an asexual pride flag that I preferably wanted to buy from an Ace owned shop. And nobody, not even the folks at AVEN, nobody online could tell me where I could do such a thing. I myself am a small business owner, and I often notice around Pride Month or different celebrations, Trans Visibility Week, there’s a lot of activity around supporting business owners from whichever demographic is being celebrated during that time period. And I saw more of a lack of that for Aces and Aros than some other corners of the queer community. I have had personally mixed luck as an Ace business owner in actual queer, broadly queer business circles. And also, our podcast just got popular enough that now and then people would ask us for merch to buy from us.

Courtney: And listen, I already run my own business. We’re trying very hard not to even get more popular than we already are. We’re not trying to grow our reach or expand. And I really did not want to handle merchandise for The Ace Couple podcast. So all of these things working in tandem together, I thought, wouldn’t it be better if we took other pre-existing Ace and or Aro business owners and gave them a spot to feature them, highlight them, places where our listeners could also go and shop. And thus the marketplace was born.

Courtney: And for the last two years, we have been spotlighting, on every podcast episode, one of those vendors, because you guys, we have a lot of them and there are very good, wonderful, talented, creative people on this marketplace. I am constantly blown away at the amount of talent we have on here. In fact, every shop that we have ever featured is a shop that we have personally purchased something from and been satisfied or in some other way supported them in their business.

Courtney: So I obviously certainly can’t make a guarantee, but what I can say is if you submit your shop to the Marketplace, there is a high chance that I will be shopping from you. Just because anytime I need to shop for a gift for friends, or if I’m trying to find pride merchandise for an upcoming celebration, or if I just need to buy anything in particular, the first thing I do is go to the marketplace and see if it’s something I can buy on there. And every shop on there is self-submitted. We do not add any shops on our own. We have got a form right on our website, theacecouple.com/marketplace, where if you are an Ace or Aro business owner yourself, you can submit your shop to us and we will just put it on our website and maybe shout you out in a future episode.

Royce: As things change too, there’s also an update form. We have had to this date 206 submissions. Only 172 of them are currently active because, sometimes websites change. Sites go down, people change what they’re doing, or they go on a hiatus. And every now and then, we will find and remove what are dead links. Because if someone does try to go look for something and just find multiple links that don’t go anywhere, that’s gonna be frustrating and they might stop looking.

Courtney: Yes. And there’s been maybe one or two occasions where there’s been a dead link and we’ve been able to do a Google search and find the same creator and same shop, and they just moved to another place. And in that instance, we don’t mind just swapping out the URL ourselves, but it definitely helps us out if you submit a shop update form. If you’re already on the marketplace and you’re changing any of your information, otherwise, if there is a dead link and we cannot find a substitute, it does have to go after a certain period of time. But one of the reasons why I wanted to point out that all of the marketplace vendors are self-submitted is because there was a really weird instance recently where someone on social media reached out to whomever was our featured marketplace vendor that week and was like, hey, you got a shout out on the Ace Couple podcast. And that creator hadn’t heard that yet, so they were surprised, they were excited and happy. And then several people after that were like, very weird of them to not ask your permission. To feature your work.

Courtney: And so, yeah, I guess we don’t send a message out when it’s when you are the featured vendor of the week, but if you’re on the marketplace for long enough, you will almost certainly be the featured vendor of the week at some point. And all of those people submitted a form to us on our website. We aren’t just pulling these shops off of the internet. That said, we do reserve the right to remove any shops for any ethical reason we deem fit. At this point, I think we have only needed to remove two, maybe three shops due to moral and ethical concerns, but past that, a majority of the shops that have been taken down have just been because the link broke and it is not there anymore.

Courtney: That said, we are also making a clarification here and now about what sort of shops we accept onto the marketplace. We have, for instance, been asked if someone is not themselves Ace or Aro, but they sell pride merchandise that include our flag colors. At this time, no. We have some marketplace vendors who do have plenty of pride merch. We have some who don’t sell anything pride related at all.

Courtney: Our intention behind this is to feature members of our community who are making and creating and selling very cool things with their own small business. So the owners of these shops all identify as asexual and or aromantic. And we do want these to be small businesses where the general public can purchase goods or services from them. A lot of our marketplace vendors have their very own websites to that end. Several of them are on platforms such as Etsy. Some of them have shops on Ko-fi. Things like these are perfectly acceptable.

Courtney: What we do not want to see are shops that are just links to a social media profile. So if you have ever filled out a shop and you have just given us a link to your Twitter account, or a link to your Instagram account. Even Patreon, we’ve sort of gone back and forth with whether or not we were going to allow. And at this point, our general rule of thumb that we are going to put out into the world until further notice is no shops that are gated by the need to have an account with the platform that it’s on. So even say a small creator who has an Instagram account and they say in their bio DM for commissions and they place orders through there.

Courtney: Unfortunately, at this point with the current social media landscape, I can’t even see your Instagram feed unless I myself have an Instagram account. I cannot contact you unless I have an Instagram account. And I don’t want one. And a shockingly high percentage of our listeners are the same way. I’ve met a lot of you out in the wild who are like, yeah, I’m not on any social media platforms. And I think as, you know, politics and toxicity and who owns these platforms and AI and everything just begins to come to a head even more than it already has. I think it’s going to be harder and harder for people to do business via social media in that way on those very specific platforms.

Courtney: That doesn’t mean you can’t be a completely online based business. That is perfectly fine if all of your business is online. You don’t have to have a physical store, although we do have a couple of marketplace vendors who both sell online and have a physical location if you’re in that area, which I think is extremely cool and I’d love to see even more of those pop up. And we’ve had some questions as well about, you know, what if I am an A-spec creator, but I don’t actually have any goods or services that I sell? What if I’m a small YouTuber who makes videos? What if I create webcomics? Can I still be on the marketplace? And most folks too, unfortunately, I don’t think are a good place for what we’re trying to do with the marketplace. Don’t get me wrong, if someone else out there has the time and ability and platform to do so, that is just here is a bunch of A-spec content creators and make a database like that, that would be awesome.

Royce: But that’s not what this is for.

Courtney: That’s not what this is for. This is truly for small businesses that have goods or services that the general population can purchase from. And I even in my day-to-day life, people I know locally and in person, I have recommended certain marketplace shops. So as a shopper on the marketplace, couple of ways you can browse. We have some identity tags which are all self-selected when our vendors fill out the form. We have Aro, Ace, BIPOC, disabled, intersex, neurodivergent, non-binary, transgender. That also really helps for overlapping Pride celebrations, you know, trans day of visibility. Do you want to shout out a trans and A-spec small creator? We’ve got a ton of them on here.

Courtney: We’ve also got some product tags if you’re looking for anything in particular. We have actually recently made the decision to pare those down a little bit. We had a ton of them and so some have been sort of consolidated and others have been added. For instance, not too long ago we added professional services because we do want this to be available for people who offer things like accessibility consulting or sensitivity readers. If we have speakers or web developers, all sorts of things that can be considered professional services. Now that we’ve added that category, I would love to see it grow. But professional services does not include commissioned artwork. We have our own tag for that. We have a bunch of talented artists who do commission work, but we really want to make sure that folks can search for whether they’re looking for commission or if they just want to buy ready to buy artwork in a shop or if they specifically want something physical and handmade. We’ve got tags for all those things.

Courtney: And then, of course, Pride merchandise versus non Pride merchandise. You know, in just a few months, we’re gonna be getting ready for International Asexuality Day. In less time than that, it’s going to be Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. So leading up to those celebrations, if you’re specifically looking for Pride merchandise, you know where to go. But maybe you’re just looking for fun little t-shirts, stickers, buttons, coffee mugs, things like that that aren’t necessarily Pride related. That’s the non-Pride merch. You can search for that too.

Courtney: There’s a search bar. You can search for specific shops if you’ve heard us mention them on the podcast, but of course we always put links to our featured marketplace vendor in the show notes and YouTube description. Or you can try searching for keywords. We have a description for every shop, which is also written by the shop owner. But not every shop is necessarily going to put in their description every single type of product that they sell either. So sometimes it does take a little searching, but I promise you all there are really, really cool shops here. If you haven’t checked out the marketplace yet, I highly encourage you to do so. If you haven’t searched the marketplace in a while, maybe pop back in. We are adding new shops pretty regularly and we always update with any new shops that we received on Wednesdays. Around the same time we release our podcast episodes.

Courtney: And I guess last little note, a quick one about shops that go on hiatus. I see it a lot on Etsy shops. Sometimes Etsy shops will take a pause. And we don’t consider that a broken link until it has been an excessive period of time. We’ll leave an Etsy shop off if they’ve just been on break for a month or two, but there was a shop or two that was on break for an entire year and after an entire year rolls around and you haven’t come back, we’re probably gonna remove that.

Courtney: But if you ever find that due to a broken link or a prolonged hiatus that your shop has been taken down, if you do ever reopen or move to a new platform that isn’t gated by a profile, fill out another form, fill out a shop update form. We have no issues putting those back up. And in fact, we’d love to see you back. There have been a couple of cases where I have purchased from a shop and by the time I tried to shout them out as a featured marketplace vendor, I’ve gone back to that shop and seen that it has been taken down and I’ve been devastated.

Courtney: So that’s really all for today. Just a quick little touch and base with the marketplace. And we’re not going to do a featured marketplace vendor today since it is a short sort of housekeeping episode. I don’t anticipate we’re going to have a lot of people listening all the way to the end. So I don’t want to put any poor shop in the position of being the featured vendor on our least listened to episode for probably the entire year. So if you made it this long, there’s no individual featured marketplace vendor, but please check it out anyway, theacecouple.com/marketplace, do a little browsing and hopefully you’ll find something that you like. As always, thank you all so much for being here as we close out 2025. Good riddance. Am I right? And we will see you all in 2026.