Etsy would be better served by shoring up its advantage in craftpeople sellers, including artisinal products, one of a
kind items, and handmade creations.
Etsy has had difficult times since the spring IPO. The causes that I see are primarily due to large increases (+50%) in spending vs. no corresponding movement in income. Discoverability/search has decreased, and gamed listings by knockoff manufacturers are squeezing out legitimate handcrafters.
In addition, Etsy sellers who are true independents are moving to other hosting platforms that provide more capabilities such as Wix and SquareSpace, and to more popular promotions areas such as Instagram and Pinterest. Amazon Handmade looks promising as well.
Rather than trying to diversify into manufacturers and supply choices, Etsy would be wise IMHO to focus on its core strength of handcrafting, and specifically focus on two immediate goals:
1) Significantly improve discoverability/search. Esty needs to make it easier for people to locate items by e.g. regional areas, fair trade practices, true handcrafting, one of a kind items, etc.
2) Return the Etsy treasuries. Treasuries were user-curated collections featuring browse by image. The treasuries worked much like Pinterest, and looked somewhat like Instagram. The important aspects are the user curation and the inclusion of multiple craftspeople and items on one page.
The manufacturers were already on Etsy anyway, and Etsy wasn't really making much of an effort to get rid of them, so it's basically a move to legitimize the status quo. I agree that the brand damage is probably going to hurt in the long term, Amazon and eBay have already locked up the "generic crap from China" market. But I guess Etsy is probably thinking that their money spends just like everyone else's, so.
I strongly agree with your first point. Etsy's search is hot garbage, you just can't get there from here. The only major e-commerce site with a comparably bad search is Amazon, and they are highly aware of how many of their inlinks are coming from "productName amazon" and working hard to rectify the problem.
Personally I wish more sites implemented searches that let you get at categories and attributes and apply Boolean logic to them (eg "glass bowl NOT pipe region:PacificNorthWest"). At least then the powerusers can eventually strugglebus their way through the crap. Ebay's search is actually fantastic in this respect, and you can find a lot of the same stuff that's on Etsy - much more easily. Especially, again, the generic Chinese crap.
Now mind you, I've never seen anyone actually DOCUMENT their searches well, even in the cases where they implement them. Not even Google has a single source where you can find everything.
I used to be an Etsy customer. Now the site has turned into eBay but with worse filtering/categorisation than eBay itself (and a smaller selection).
Etsy used to be good because items were either literally made by someone in their living room, or at least made by small businesses. It was more expensive, but the products were made in small batches so could be much more targeted/niche.
Plus you had tons of commission sellers that did customisation. And these were real people you could actually contact and discuss your needs, not drones pumping out generic items with your name stamped on them.
Now, being realistic, there was always mass produced items on Etsy. But it was like an 80/20 thing (20% being mass produced) and it was pretty easy to tell who was what.
Now if you go on the site it is like 10/90 (90%+ are mass produced). And worse still it is too difficult to find anything that is not, the "Handmade" checkbox is a lie.
So now Etsy is another eBay. That's fine on the face of it, but eBay makes it far easier to find, sort, and filter. So ultimately Etsy is now an eBay with an inferior site design.
PS - If others choose to use Etsy, more power to you, I just want an Etsy replacement that does custom goods again.
Since Etsy is battling to achieve profitability, I'm reluctant to second-guess this move. But as a consumer, I want an exclusively artisanal marketplace.
If you're patient, you can find some outrageously awesome stuff here and there on Etsy, but a lot of merchants game the system by offering the same product under many different listings. Mass-producing merchants will have the incentive and the resources to dump an avalanche of listings for low-margin dreck on the site. I doubt the ability of the Etsy team to counter that effect and maintain the kind of marketplace where someone interested in artisanal goods would want to shop.
Exactly, this is not at all like when eBay changed from people selling stuff out of their garage to mostly regular retailers. In that case, the nature of the merchandise didn't change, and the service actually got better because you were dealing with pros.
Etsy has some wonderful sellers and items (in his spare time, a guy is making me a pair of gorgeous faceted opals that you can't find anywhere else) but if it becomes mass, who cares? The degree to which they succeed in doing Etsy Manufacturing is going to be the degree which they become irrelevant to anyone looking for their traditional handmade product. If I just want something cute I can go to Target. It's the exclusivity that creates the value.
Agreed. I don't know why etsy isn't profitable (really? seems like a fairly simple site), but I use it exclusively to avoid manufactured stuff. Same goes for tindie.
Etsy is one of the 50 most popular websites in the US, according to Alexa. And because it's facilitating ecommerce, it has to handle a lot of anti-fraud measures, customer service... all that seeming simplicity over that actual complexity costs a fair amount of money.
I only know of etsy through their software blog, so this might be a bit left field, but I have always wondered how much money there really is in that "perfect" hand made item. Most artists in Anglo-Saxon world can't make a living - they either have jobs and do painting / sculpting as a hobby, or they turn to crafts (I'm a three-year postgrad trained sculpture artist - can I make you a gate for your driveway?)
Our society simply does not value art sufficiently to pay a living wage for it. Look at painting - the number of prints and posters sold in the mass market is enormous. At between 10 and 100 bucks it's a fairly common and lucrative trade, and some photos of New York can be found in a million IKEA furnished homes.
But if IKEA stocked genuine, hand painted one offs, even in the volumes needed, would they go at say, 500 to 1000 bucks?
(I assume we want a nice painting of average poster size - so 2-5 days work to paint a canvas at a decent rate - about 25,000 bucks pa at the low end - just above the U.S. Poverty line if raising a family)
So, not disparaging etsy, but my "mental smell test", highly biased that it is, tells me that 1000 bucks for a painting against 750 for a sofa won't go well at the mass market - and it won't go well in a mass market web site either.
Etsy is a Walmart, stocked high with that "perfect distressed framed mirror", and wondering where the impedance mismatch is coming from.
Our society simply does not value art sufficiently
to pay a living wage for it [...] so 2-5 days work
to paint a canvas at a decent rate
Let's say it takes 5 working days for the artist to do a painting. Now assume the gallery markup is the same again (to cover framing, transport costs, unsold work, returns, payment processing, sales tax, and so on), so the price needs to be about 10 working days' income. Now assume 75% of my income goes on taxes and bills [1], giving me 25% for discretionary spending.
For an artist to have the same household income as an art buyer, the buyer would be spending 1.8 months' discretionary income.
I buy original paintings occasionally - but that stuff's expensive and it's difficult to see how it could be any other way.
I think that you are right about the price of art, but maybe not about craft. I don't have the time or inclination to design and letterpress my own stationary, but someone with the right equipment and skills can produce something far more distinctive than Crane's mass-produced items, for not a huge amount of effort. There's value in that.
I think there's also a role for an artisinal marketplace that's an outlet for people's hobbies. I sometimes play with a concert band that plays basically for free. 35 people rehearse a few times and show up on a Saturday morning to play for 90 minutes for $50. People do it because the process of production is pleasurable. If someone wants to throw a few bucks our way, great. People who really like making quilts need a similar outlet.
It is who you sell to. My sister went to HS with two brothers who trained as sculptors. They had to hustle for dumb jobs (like gates or repairing dumpsters) for a long time until they began to get work making interactive sculptures for playgrounds. When city councils want to build a park they tender for contracts. The brothers built their portfolio up over time and kept submitting tenders for this sort of work. Nowdays it is a successful business for them and they win contracts overseas.
Etsy isn't selling to the market that artists need to target unfortunately.
It's more a matter of originals vs. copies. The original may take 10x the time to make as the copy, but most of society doesn't value the original at 10x the copy.
I don't really follow your point about society not valuing art. If IKEA is selling enormous quantities of prints and posters, then that's a lot of money being spent on art (and I assume that you don't think that prints are 'not art'?)
On the other extreme of the art market, some paintings are fetching increasingly ridiculous multi-million dollar prices at auction. So, at both ends of the market, there is a lot of money involved. Society would appear to be valuing art.
I'm sure that at an individual level, it is hard for an artist to make a living, but is that really because art is undervalued, or simply that there is a glut of artists?
Also, what is it about the 'Anglo-Saxon world' that is different? I'm genuinely curious - is there a big cultural difference in being an artist elsewhere?
"Though Etsy does not intend to visit or otherwise directly vet manufacturers — or limit the size of companies that apply — the site will require that they commit to providing a safe and just workplace and agree to be transparent about the processes and other details involved in their manufacturing work, Ms. Peyton said.
...
Manufacturers who receive negative reviews from Etsy sellers or are found to be violating Etsy guidelines could be removed from the platform."
The last sentence seems awfully weasel-worded to me, especially since the first sentence says that, for compliance, Etsy will just take the manufacturer's word for it.
It definitely reminds me of the controversial "but we're just a platform" stance of, e.g., Uber.
If you have a hand-made product, and it suddenly explodes in popularity, it's not like hiring a company to manufacture it is easy, even if someone like Etsy is connecting you. Machine-knit is not hand-knit, for instance. I predict a lot of disappointed purchasers.
Etsy would be better served by shoring up its advantage in craftpeople sellers, including artisinal products, one of a kind items, and handmade creations.
Etsy has had difficult times since the spring IPO. The causes that I see are primarily due to large increases (+50%) in spending vs. no corresponding movement in income. Discoverability/search has decreased, and gamed listings by knockoff manufacturers are squeezing out legitimate handcrafters.
In addition, Etsy sellers who are true independents are moving to other hosting platforms that provide more capabilities such as Wix and SquareSpace, and to more popular promotions areas such as Instagram and Pinterest. Amazon Handmade looks promising as well.
Rather than trying to diversify into manufacturers and supply choices, Etsy would be wise IMHO to focus on its core strength of handcrafting, and specifically focus on two immediate goals:
1) Significantly improve discoverability/search. Esty needs to make it easier for people to locate items by e.g. regional areas, fair trade practices, true handcrafting, one of a kind items, etc.
2) Return the Etsy treasuries. Treasuries were user-curated collections featuring browse by image. The treasuries worked much like Pinterest, and looked somewhat like Instagram. The important aspects are the user curation and the inclusion of multiple craftspeople and items on one page.