About Just What You Need Marketplace

An online platform to purchase incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists' products.

The Reason Behind Our Marketplace

It is a matter of both survival and dignity that those whom the world has cast into its shadows be given the space to reclaim their light. The incarcerated and the formerly incarcerated are not rendered talentless by their condition–only unseen. Their hands, so often dictated by the machinery of punishment, have long since learned to create: to shape, to paint, to stitch, to carve, to write. Creativity is not a luxury; it is the assertion of one’s humanity against the weight of erasure.

A society that denies them the room to exhibit their skills—skills born not only of necessity but of brilliance—is a society complicit in its own failure. To create is to speak, and to speak is to exist. If we do not build spaces where their work can be seen, sold, and valued, then we are not merely overlooking talent—we are perpetuating the very cycle of dispossession we claim to dismantle.

The question, then, is not whether such a space is important, but whether we are willing to confront our own fear of what the overlooked might reveal to us—about themselves, and about us.

Quality products at Affordable Prices

Products: Art, personal accessories, furniture, and household niceties.

Nothing if not refurbished: Taking pride in finding beauty in disregarded things.

Quality and Affordable Prices :

Back Story: Often times people in the carceral system internalize the idea of being failures or even throwaways. The loss of personal individuality and power over one’s daily lives does not encourage much else. There always seems to be a point when a person decides to completely submit to learned-helpless or rely on personal psychological hardiness to claim personal power beyond current life situation. The beautification of discarded goods was born from the resilience of true psychological hardiness and the will to thrive.