Canopy: A Curated Site That Finds the Best Stuff You Can Buy on Amazon

 

All this stuff’s on Amazon? Whaaaat? Photo Illustration: WIRED

Amazon is a great place to shop. It is not a great place to browse. The downside of having an inventory that spans everything from spatulas to stuffed animals to micro SD cards is that it inevitably becomes a destination for buying those sorts of humdrum products, not a place you go to discover cool new ones.

Buried deep in its massive catalog, though, Amazon does indeed have all sorts of nice stuff. Canopy was built to help you find it.

Created by a group of former Google designers without any official affiliation to Amazon, Canopy is a curated storefront trading exclusively in beautiful products that happen to be sold on Amazon.com. It’s the same type of fare you might expect to find on sites like Svpply or Uncrate: well-designed watches, bowls, knives, stools and blankets. But where those sorts of sites so often lead to 404 pages and out-of-stock listings, Canopy comes with a built-in guarantee: everything you see is not only available to buy with a few clicks but is also eligible for free 2-day shipping with your Prime account. Online shoppers with little self-control, beware.

Treating Products Like Works of Art

The idea to build a shopping layer on top of Amazon took shape around a simple realization: while Amazon’s back-end can’t be beat, its front-end is a total mess. “We all prefer to buy things on Amazon to just about anywhere else,” says Brian Armstrong, one of the designers who co-founded the site. “Amazon has a great infrastructure to deliver products. But they’re much less involved in the kind of questions of taste around products, and how to best provide context that’s going to make you feel special when you’re buying it. These are areas we think are super important.”

Canopy: a boutique store where everything’s eligible for Prime shipping. Image: Canopy

Taste is the first filter for the stuff you’ll find on Canopy. Every one of the 7,000-some products currently on the site was hand-picked by Canopy’s five-person staff. They are, by and large, things you would not expect to find on Amazon. Visiting the site for the first time can be surprising. The real life equivalent would be like walking into a boutique store, finding a nice throw pillow, and realizing upon check-out that the inventory room in the back is actually a fully stocked Walmart.

But Canopy’s not just concerned with curation. It’s also an effort to change how these products are being presented. On Amazon, Armstrong points out, every product is shuffled into the same homogenized product page. “I recently bought a sim card adapter on Amazon–some cheap, $2 plastic thing, and the detail page for that is exactly same as an iPad or a beautiful piece of furniture,” he says. Even the nicest, most thoughtfully made objects lose some luster under the fluorescent glare of Amazon’s sterile virtual shelves. “They’re not treated with the respect that they deserve,” Armstrong explains.

Canopy’s product page, by comparison, is much cleaner–and much more deferential to the product itself. It shows a photo, a few related items, comments that have been left by Canopy members, and a prominent link to Amazon. According to Armstrong, the idea is to treat each product like a piece of art.

To this end, Canopy puts special care into product photography. It’s one place where Amazon’s disinterested approach to its inventory is occasionally made plain. Armstrong remembers seeing a nice mortal and pestle set in a New York Times gift guide last holiday season, accompanied by a beautiful photograph the Times itself had commissioned. Out of curiosity, Armstrong checked to see if it was on Amazon. It was–with a 50 x 50 pixel image, blown-up to a point of near indecipherability. “It looked terrible,” he recalls.

To avoid this sort of mess, Canopy manually curates the image for every product it adds to the site. The team could even start doing product photography of its own for future sections of the site.

The idea is to treat each product like a work of art. Image: Canopy

Giving Amazon a New Face

Canopy recently opened up to the public, but it’s still figuring out what exactly the experience should entail. Currently, the default view is a popular page, where products are algorithmically surfaced based on the number of users who have recommended them. You can also browse by category or search if you’ve got something in mind. The next step is figuring out how to get people to come back to the site.

“We think of Canopy like a museum of amazing products where all of the products are available to buy right now,” Armstrong says. “It’s similar to the MOMA store in some way. And I think right now we’ve built the MOMA store. What we haven’t built are the exhibits.” Amazon doesn’t have any trouble bringing buyers back to the site; we head there by reflex when we need a book, or a spatula, or a SIM card adapter. One challenge Canopy faces is figuring out how to draw people back to their less-expansive offerings.

The big question, of course, is how Amazon feels about a bunch of upstarts building a museum store on top of its infrastructure. Apparently, totally fine. Armstrong met with a group of Amazon execs early in the development of the site and received their blessing. After all, while Canopy’s referral links will net its creators a small percentage of every transaction, the site ultimately serves to drive buyers to Amazon itself.

There’s a chance, however, that Canopy could ultimately help Amazon in ways that go beyond its discovery problems. Armstrong says he’s already been contacted by a number of companies who don’t normally associate with Amazon. Where their brands don’t necessarily align with Amazon’s, they might well be a good fit for Canopy. Armstrong had just had a conversation with an L.A.-based essential ware outfit earlier this month. “They had never actually considered shipping on Amazon before,” he says, “but they were willing to go through the process of getting their products on Amazon in order to be on Canopy.”

By offering an alternative to Amazon’s unglamorous virtual shelves, in other words, Canopy could actually help bring new products into the ecosystem. In that sense, a prettier face for the world’s biggest virtual store could be something everyone welcomes.