Discovery, not a marketplace
EMMI helps people find Australian merchants, makers, manufacturers, suppliers and repairers. It does not intermediate the sale or collapse independent businesses into a single storefront.
Make the good local option legible.
The Ethical Merchant & Maker Index is a public discovery layer for finding Australian businesses by what they make, repair, grow, manufacture or supply — and by the documented practices that matter to the person searching.
Evidence instead of a universal score
A practice such as Australian-made, repairable, low-waste or transparent sourcing is represented as a claim with evidence, source and freshness. People choose which attributes are required, preferred or excluded for their own search.
Unknown stays unknown
Missing evidence is not silently converted into a negative judgement. Conflicting, stale and partially supported claims remain visible as distinct verification states.
Place has precision
A verified public premises point, a locality-level operating base, a regional service area and an online-only Australian business are different location states. EMMI does not infer a street marker from a vague location claim.
B2C and B2B share the same graph
The same evidence model supports a household looking for a repairer and a business looking for a local fabricator, supplier or production capability. Intent changes discovery and ranking, not the underlying facts.
Temporal provenance is first-class
Businesses, legal entities, brands, facilities, offerings, relationships and event appearances can change independently over time. The canonical data model keeps source and validity history instead of overwriting the past.
Products and delivery
A business claim is not a product claim.
Australian-made, handmade and similar words are shown on a product only when that product record states them. A locally owned shop can sell an imported product without that product becoming Australian made. Delivery to a postcode is confirmed, unavailable, or unknown. A general Australia-wide shipping sentence is unknown for a specific postcode, and the honest label is to check with the maker. You complete the purchase on the maker’s own site.
Publication model
Research data is not automatically public data.
EMMI keeps research candidates and public profiles separate. Identity, trading status, location, operating history and practice claims can each have different evidence strength. Publication is an explicit projection from the canonical provenance graph, not a side effect of a record existing in the research corpus.