Our journey
ledge started with two childhood friends from the same football team, Zachi and Vali, who got tired of ads and built a marketplace that puts founders and their stories first. No middlemen, no noise, no paid slots.
Behind every brand there is a story. Ours starts on a football pitch. Zachi and I have been on the same team at FC Alte Haide München since we were kids, that is the two of us in the photo above, and we have been friends ever since. After school, each of us went our own way. Zachi studied economics in Barcelona, while I ended up working in the advertising industry. Three years ago we got back together to build something. That something became ledge. (By the way: we're also back playing football together at our old club, FC Alte Haide.)
We were both tired of ads.
Why we started
Online, the brands that shout loudest, or pay the most, are the ones you see. The good, small ones get buried. We wanted the opposite: a place where a brand can speak directly to the people who actually care about what it makes. No middlemen, no noise, no paid slots.
It did not arrive fully formed. Dozens of prototypes and iterations later, we have now launched the ledge web app, a new-school marketplace. We curate Europe's most committed founder-led brands, tell their story and connect you with the makers behind the brand.
Who we do it for
Along the way we sat down with a lot of founders to understand their days. Most of them are doing everything at once: sales, marketing, production, sourcing, packaging. They go to extraordinary lengths to make honest, everyday things. They do not have to. They want to.
The last thing they need is another chore. What they need is time to breathe, high-quality traffic that actually converts, honest feedback that shows them where the gaps are, and a few other founders and makers who understand the work. That is what we are trying to be. And they gave something back. On the harder days the calls with these enthusiastic founders were often what kept us going.
Where we are now
Today, we are a small team, working between Munich and Santiago de Chile, so our day starts in Germany and carries on across the Atlantic. Although we have an amazing team now, the journey has not been smooth. No honest version of this ever is. But the thing we set out to build is real, and it is all rooted in the idea that we talked about on a friend's balcony over 4 years ago.
We are proud of where we are, and it does not feel like a finish line. People over logos. Taste and human connection, the parts you cannot automate. The quiet pleasure of finding something good and knowing there is a real person behind it. That was true on the pitch, and it is still what we are building towards.
Read by people who care how things are made.
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