It Ain’t Easy Being Etsy
With millions of items on sale at any given time, though, how does a company of 180 people weed out the resellers of mass-made goods? The answer is, it doesn’t—at least not well enough to keep its members from crying foul. Recognizing it has a problem, Etsy in the last year has upped its customer support staff from around 20 to 40 employees and is working on better software tools to screen for items that violate its policies. These efforts have been undermined, however, by a recent string of high-profile reseller mishaps. In October, the site published a post on its Storque blog by jeweler Temple St. Clair in which she asked Etsy shoppers to pledge not to buy items made with coral. Given that many Etsy sellers use coral (the legally obtained kind) in their work, this plea went over rather poorly, sparking a 30-page comment thread that a site administrator eventually shut down. Further fanning the flames was the fact that St. Clair, whose jewelry is sold in stores including Saks, Bloomingdale’s, and Target, was given space to promote products that could never be listed on Etsy in the first place.
Perhaps more embarrassing was an episode this February wherein Glamour magazine put together a web feature on “6 Wedding Dresses from Etsy.” “Big hurrahs to the Etsy sellers featured on Glamour Weddings!” posted an Etsy administrator on the company’s Facebook page. Problem was, one of the dresses had come from a reseller. “I’m not even half as disgusted at the fact that resellers exist,” wrote one commenter, “as I am at the fact that Etsy can’t tell the difference or just doesn’t give a rat’s ass.”
The Glamour incident gained broad attention through a post on the website Regretsy, whose proprietor April Winchell noted the feature and pointed out the reseller among the dresses. Two months later, Winchell posted another reseller story, this time highlighting a back-and-forth in which a member emailed an Etsy admin to note that one of the items she’d listed in her personal favorites was from a reseller and had been featured on the site’s front page. Somewhat missing the point, the admin thanked the member and suggested she flag the shop.
A voice actor and radio host (her professional achievements include being banned for life from Los Angeles’s KABC 790 for relating on-air a story about Bill O’Reilly melting down over stale green-room croissants), Winchell started Regretsy in 2009 to make fun of Etsy sellers’ more egregious handiwork (“Where DIY meets WTF” is the site’s tagline). Her focus, though, has shifted since then as she’s come to believe, she says, that the company is “doing something awful” by profiting off its members’ misguided aspirations.
“I think they have a lot of things in place either purposely or not that really support an unfair sort of dream that, for a lot of people, they’re never going to reach,” Winchell says. “A big amount of the money they make is created on the backs of people who will never sell anything.”
