After all, Etsy was designed as a marketplace for “the handmade.” The whole point is that the site offers a way for individual makers to connect with individual buyers. But trying to keep up with orders on her own was threatening to turn Johnson’s business into a one-woman sweatshop. Etsy rules allow “collectives,” but that’s a vague and unbusinesslike term. “No one knows what it means,” she says. After the holiday crush, Johnson was so spent that she shuttered her store for the entire month of January to recover. She knew that if she wanted to build a real business, she’d eventually have to scale up production. She wondered if she had outgrown Etsy.
This was a big problem for Johnson, but it was also troubling for Etsy. Today the site attracts 42 million unique visitors a month, who browse almost 15 million products. More than 800,000 sellers use the service. Most are producing handmade goods as a sideline. But losing motivated sellers like Johnson, who are making a full-time living on Etsy, means saying good-bye to a hugely profitable part of its community.
From its start in 2005, Etsy was a rhetoric-heavy enterprise that promised to do more than simply turn a profit. It promoted itself as an economy-shifter, making possible a parallel retail universe that countered the alienation of mass production with personal connections and unique, handcrafted items. There was no reason to outsource manufacturing, the thinking went, if a sea of individual sellers took the act of making into their own hands—literally.
The approach worked well enough to establish the startup. Etsy makes money from every listing (20 cents apiece) as well as every sale (a 3.5 percent cut). It has been profitable since 2009, and in July 2012 year-over-year sales were up more than 75 percent. Not bad for a retailer selling mostly nonessential products during one of the most sluggish chapters in the history of American consumer spending.
But now Etsy finds itself at a crossroads. Sellers like Johnson, reaching the limits of what the service allows (as well as what it can do for them), are being forced to consider moving on. Meanwhile, the hobbyists and artisans who make up the rest of the marketplace still value Etsy’s founding ethos—that handmade items have an intrinsic value that should be celebrated and given a forum outside of traditional retail.
How to reconcile these competing visions of what it means to be an Etsy seller isn’t clear. While the site wants to remain an accessible entry point for newbies, it doesn’t want the narrative arc for successful sellers to arrive at the inevitable plot point: “And then I started a real business.”
by Rob Walker, Wired | Read more:
Photo: Zachary Zavislak
