A home for the quiet makers of Israeli craft.

When I was twelve I inherited a shoebox of her things. Twenty-three hand-painted postcards from artists she had found in tiny galleries along the Dizengoff strip, in studio sales in Jaffa, in one case from a woman who wove tablecloths on a wooden loom in her kitchen in Safed. Each was signed. Each had a price pencilled lightly on the back. None cost more than thirty shekels.

Thirty years later I went looking for that woman with the loom. Her granddaughter still wove. She was still in Safed. She had no website, no online shop, no way for anyone outside of her physical neighbourhood to find her. She told me: "I make about 40 pieces a year. I sell 6. The rest just sit."

Calico started there. For her, and for the other 3,800 Israeli artists like her — people who make extraordinary things at a quiet, human pace, and who have no interest in competing with factories. We built a marketplace where every piece is held in escrow, every artist is verified, and every transaction goes directly to the person who made the thing.

My grandmother's postcards are still in my desk drawer. This is, in some sense, a way of keeping them there — but letting everybody buy new ones.