PanaMIA Club: Help Create SoFlo Local's Directory

Being a small business owner may be really overwhelming and isolating at times, but you aren’t alone. Miami is filled with small vendors, all with different strengths and skillsets. We started Pana Mia as a way to bring everyone together, to pool our resources, insights and strategies, to create a more collective and cooperative approach to engaging customers interested in supporting local. As consumers start recognizing the benefits of shopping local, we want to create a centralized space where they can explore and fall in love with local brands.

- Directory: Vendors perpetually struggle with getting their product in front of their target audience and patrons who want to support local struggle with the convenience of shopping at Big Box stores for everyday errands. Often supporting local is designated to sporadic “events” that fails to provide consistency for either party. Our goal is to meet the needs of both by creating a local directory of small vendors in Miami. If customers want to shop for x, they can filter through different categories and directly reach out to the vendor that meets their needs. The categories allow for virtually all Pana Members to be listed, and we can also rotate featured Vendors of the month to highlight specific members. This makes it easier and more convenient to shop local.

- Vendor workshops. Miami is filled with small vendors, all with different strengths and skillsets. We started Pana Mia Club as a way to bring everyone together, to pool our resources, insights and strategies. On our signup form, vendors can specify if they want to offer workshops to the community. Topics include general knowledge such as shipping, web design and tax write-off info; however, it can also include more industry specific knowledge such as how to take a food product to market, sourcing solutions in apparel, and music production. We want to compile and open source document of links that will be easy to access for all our members. Eventually we would like to produce a series of workshops from community members available to everyone.

- Vendor Community. We would like to be host to an ever-growing and changing active group of local entrepreneurs and artists. Our intention is to host a space where creatives and entrepreneurs in similar or intersecting industries can discuss, ask for help/advice, or even collaborate on projects. It also will allow us to directly reach our members for Club projects and get feedback/suggestions or direct help as we progress.

- Market transparency. It seems like new markets pop up every day. We want to create a database of markets and collect vendor feedback. More info means vendors can make the best decision for their business. Ultimately we could collectively bargain with markets to make vendor fees more fair and equitable.