When our favourite indies were shutting their doors around us this time last year, we knew we had to do something to help. Good Liverpool was built as a platform for small indies to easily move into the online space and continue working even with their doors closed.

In our eyes, GL, as we have so lovingly dubbed it (also sometimes referred to as "The better Amazon", whispered quietly though, Alexa might be listening!) has always been more than just a marketplace.

We wanted to create a positive, optimistic place that, rather than ignore what was going on around us, focused the good things happening, and that's where Kobi comes in.

Kindly donated to us by the masterful Yeye Weller, Kobi is the vibe guy in these parts. That smiley, round face is on every page of the platform, keeping us all looking onwards and upwards, reminding us that Liverpool is the place for greatness.

In the early days, we focused on food & drink businesses as we knew that industry would be really hard hit by any lockdowns. Our good friends Sean (Pruno Wines), Stefano (Rafala), Dom (Carnival Brewing) & more have been with us since the start and we are over the moon to have been able to work with them for almost a year now!

Since then we have been able to grow to over 35 indies on our platform, selling everything from food & drink, to jewellery, homeware, clothing and more! Each of these businesses are from the Liverpool region and are weaving themselves into the Liverpool retail scene (in the case of The Liverpool Weaving Co., we mean that literally).

As time has gone on, we realised this has far more potential than just being a lockdown side project to help our friends, family, neighbours, this has the ability to change the landscape of retail culture and truly push Liverpool's independent scene to the forefront of the UK.

Good Liverpool has always been more to us than just an online marketplace, we love this city and decided very early on that anything we did would have an impact on the community around us.

We teamed up with St Andrews Community Network, working closely with the North Liverpool Food bank. Through support from our indies, customers and our own donations, we have been able to provide meals for people in the city for the past year.

Our collaborations with Carnival Brewing Co. (anyone remember Santa's Belter? Rumour is Gerry Cinnamon's "She's a Belter" was inspired by that beer) and Neighbourhood Coffee Roasters were the perfect opportunities for us to give back with 10p from each sale going to the North Liverpool Food Bank.

Our Carnival collaboration gave us the inspiration to achieve something bigger than just creating a beer (pretty awesome to be able to say that) and donating some money. We wanted to get hands on in helping our city, so we created the Good Liverpool Academy.

One of our proudest initiatives, the Good Liverpool Academy is the beginning of our support and growth for the independent scene in Liverpool. We have agreed with our collaboration partners that together we will host training programmes for people that have been affected by the pandemic.

Carnival will be hosting the first Academy with a workshop on craft brewing followed by a workshop hosted by Neighbourhood Coffee to teach people the art of coffee roasting. Our goal is to strengthen the independent scene in the city and open doors to sectors that people may never have looked at if it wasn't for this.

 This has been a damn Good journey so far and we can't wait to see what's to come over the next year. Doing Good really does feel great and we hope you agree. Welcome to the Good Liverpool community, we hope you'll like it here :)