RECHARGE Diary

Between May and June, the team at Museo del Tessuto di Prato held a series of bilateral co-creation workshops to engage more people in the definition and implementation of the proposed business model the museum is working on in the context of the RECHARGE project. 

The meetings saw the participation of seven artisans, designers and companies working with upcycling, circular materials and sustainable production processes, engaged with creative recovery and reuse of discarded fabric, with social sustainability and the promotion of ethical working conditions to disadvantaged people in the fashion field, biological and upcycled jewellery; and three small museums from Tuscany, which already have established collaborations with their local artisans communities. The three museums involved well represent the variety of Tuscanian cultural heritage, spanning from paleontological and renaissance paintings collections to the preservation of paper artefacts and related manufacturing techniques.

The goal of the workshops was to identify the goods to be co-created and sold on the future Museo del Tessuto e-commerce demo, as well as discuss the viable terms and conditions for the partnership between the museum and the participants.

The artisans, designers, companies and museums involved were chosen because of their consistency with the value proposition of the Museo del Tessuto online revenues business model, which, as we already explained in another focused post, aims to develop a commonly owned e-commerce platform for museums to individually sell locally and ethically sourced, sustainability-oriented quality goods.

The process of each bilateral co-creation workshop, whether it was held online or on site, followed a co-design canvas structured in various steps:

• Identification of partners’ motivations to be featured in a museum e-shop and specifically MTP e-shop
• Identification of barriers in being included in the e-commerce of MTP
• Co-selection of items in partners’ catalogue
• Identification of items to be co-created, based on existing lines of production, via brainstorming
• Interactive feasibility evaluation to shortlist a few co-selected and co-created items to be sold in the e-shop in terms of production costs and timing, availability of material etc. and potential customers desiderability in terms of sales history, price, uniqueness etc.

What did we learn? From the perspective of artisans, designers and companies, being featured in a museum e-commerce appears to have a great branding value, as the museum is perceived, by makers but also by the potential buyers, as a guarantor of the material and conceptual quality of the objects on sale. The small museums, which will be featured on the Museo del Tessuto’s e-commerce, consider this project as a fulfilling challenge: a way of innovating their processes and also better understanding how to declare their own identity in a space shared with other sister institutions, to try out strategies and make products available to a wider, international public at almost no cost.

**The images illustrating this post come from the workshop held at the Museo della Carta di Pescia