"Marketplaces to Watch"
Featured on Awwwards' annual list of marketplaces reshaping how digital work is discovered and sold.
About — Est. 2019, Lisbon
A marketplace built by curators, for extraordinary digital work.
Digital Bric-a-Brac was founded in 2019 by Mara Whitfield and Jonas Reuter — both formerly senior curators at Dribbble — who believed a creator-first marketplace should be run by people who have actually spent a decade editing work for a living. Five years later, 84,000+ creators call it home.
88% revenue share · 48-hour human review · No listing fees
By the numbers — a marketplace that's earned its scale.
84,000+
Active sellers
1.2M
Registered buyers
312,000+
Digital assets listed
$74M
2023 gross marketplace volume
Sold to buyers in 142 countries · Localized checkout in 11 currencies · Same-day payouts for sellers in 38 countries.
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The Lisbon studio where it started — 2019.
The founding story
Two curators walked away from incumbents to fix what was broken.
For nearly a decade, Mara Whitfield and Jonas Reuter edited and published the work of independent designers as senior curators at Dribbble. They'd watched the same story repeat itself: talented creators undercutting each other on price, racing to the bottom on volume, and watching the marketplaces they sold through take fifty, sixty, sometimes seventy cents on every dollar.
In the spring of 2019 they left to build the marketplace they wished had existed — one where the editorial bar was set by humans who had actually shipped work, where the revenue share favored the maker, and where every listing passed through a real pair of eyes before it reached a buyer. They chose Lisbon for its quiet creative community, registered Digital Bric-a-Brac Lda., and opened submissions in October of that year.
Today the team is 47 people across nine countries — curators, engineers, and a quality review desk in three time zones — but the founding principle hasn't moved: creator-first economics, curated over exhaustive, reviewed by humans.
- Founder Mara Whitfield — ex-senior curator, Dribbble
- Co-founder Jonas Reuter — ex-senior curator, Dribbble & Behance
- Headquarters Rua da Boavista 84, 1200-068 Lisbon, Portugal
- Team 47 people · 9 countries · fully distributed
The 48-Hour Review
Every asset passes through human hands within 48 hours. Here's exactly how.
The 48-hour review is the reason Digital Bric-a-Brac feels curated rather than crowded. It's run by a full-time quality desk — not an algorithm — and it ends in one of two outcomes: published, with a creator note attached, or returned with specific feedback. The current approval rate sits at 96.4%, and assets average a 4.9★ rating across all 312,000+ listings.
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Submission & triage
When a creator hits publish, the listing lands in our review queue with metadata, preview files, and the creator's own description. Most submissions are picked up by a specialist within four hours.
Avg. intake · under 4 hours -
02
Category specialist review
A reviewer with deep domain experience in that category — UI kits, 3D, fonts, plugins — opens every file, checks the preview against the source, and writes a short editorial note that appears on the live listing.
Reviewed by a human specialist -
03
Originality & safety checks
We run a manual originality pass against our existing catalogue and the wider web, confirm commercial licensing is clear, and flag anything that would put a buyer's project at legal risk. Listings that fail get a written explanation, not a silent rejection.
Licensing & originality verified -
04
Publish or return
Approved assets go live with the editorial note attached — the median time from submission to live is 31 hours. Returned assets come back with line-level feedback the creator can act on; 78% of returned submissions are resubmitted and approved within a week.
96.4% approval rate · 4.9★ average
Press & backing
Named by the publications we grew up reading, funded by people who know the space.
Best Marketplace for Independent Creators
Awarded for creator-first economics, the 88% revenue share, and the editorial standard of the catalogue.
Editorial coverage
Long-form features in The Verge, multiple explainers on CSS-Tricks, and a recurring spot on Sidebar.io's Sunday digest.
$14.2M Series A
Led by Index Ventures, with participation from a small group of operator angels from Figma, Framer, and Webflow. Capital earmarked for the review desk and same-day payout rails.
We didn't set out to build the biggest marketplace. We set out to build a forever home for extraordinary work — the kind of place where a buyer in Berlin and a creator in São Paulo can trust each other because a real person on our team looked at both sides of the trade. If we ever lose that, the 88% won't matter.