It Ain’t Easy Being Etsy
This is a fairly widespread critique—that Etsy pushes an unrealistic vision of a full-time job in arts and crafts in order to draw sellers to the site. And if you run the numbers, it’s clear enough that a living wage must be the exception rather than the rule. $314 million in sales split between 800,000 sellers comes out to a little over $390 per person. Certainly there are some members who’ve turned Etsy into a regular gig, but they’re a diminishing minority.
The anger directed at the company in some of the forums and on sites like EtsyBitch surley stems in part from this disconnect between what sellers feel they’ve been promised and what Etsy is able to deliver. Some complaints are probably more reasonable than others. When Herger notes that she had three years of work basically destroyed by the site’s SEO changes, it seems a legitimate grievance. When the Cranky One gripes that seller-tool requests are being ignored because the company is run by hipster doofuses that sit around playing Rock Band all day, it seems somewhat less so.
To the extent that Etsy has failed to make its sellers’ dreams come true, this is probably because it was never intended to do so. As Maguire said, the site was originally conceived as a straightforward ecommerce venture; the notion of building a handmade planet was tacked on after the fact. It’s there now, though. From Kalin’s “change the world” comments to its “Quit Your Day Job” features, the idea of Etsy as a viable alternative to the industrial economy is well-embedded in the site. It seems that at some point, amid all the money, the media, and the acclaim for what has been, undeniably, quite an astonishing success, Etsy got wrapped up in the story it was selling. The question now is whether it can close the gap between that rhetoric and reality.
The company finds itself at the intersection of a time (the ongoing inflation of the Web 2.0 bubble) and a place (Brooklyn, which unlike much of the rest of the world happens to be both dense enough and wealthy enough to support a strong roster of small-scale, handmade businesses), where changing global commerce one DIY item at a time seems almost—at least when the light hits just right—a plausible idea. That doesn’t mean it actually is a plausible idea, though. Asked where the company might go in the future, Stinchcomb turns expansive, describing it enabling the exchange of food, entertainment, even electricity. Etsy “is about connecting people and exchange in a way that’s a more ethical, sustainable, fun path to the world,” he says. “We see handmade as bigger than just a knitted sweater.” At the same time, however, he notes that the majority of the site’s sellers don’t arrive expecting to make a living. But making a living remains, for most people, what commerce is all about.
Put another way, is it really a better “path to the world” to buy a hand-printed t-shirt from a middle-class hobbyist in Santa Fe than one bulk-produced in Bangladesh? That probably depends on just who’s running the factory. Almost certainly, though, from the perspective of livelihood, the sale means more to the Bangladeshi garment worker than the part-time crafter in New Mexico. Building the new economy that Kalin and Stinchcomb gesture toward means providing a realistic route by which sellers can build profitable businesses. You can imagine how Etsy might, in fact, facilitate that—giving artisans in developing countries access to First-World buyers who can pay enough to make handmade a better gig than a factory job. But the company isn’t pursuing these markets. It’s expanding into Western Europe.
And Europe, as Stinchcomb describes it, seems even less likely than the US to spearhead the drive toward a handmade planet. From Berlin, he observes that the entrepreneurial dreams that animate many Etsy sellers seem less common in Germany than stateside. What’s needed to get this show rolling, though, isn’t less capitalist fervor, but more. Railla notes that Etsy has been “slightly controversial” in the craft community because of the way that it’s monetized DIY. How better, though, to make pervasive the idea of handmade than by monetizing it? There are, no doubt, substantial social and cultural dimensions to how we make, buy, and sell the things we want and need, but fundamentally these decisions are driven by economics. Etsy will only be successful in pushing DIY as a movement to the extent that it’s effective at making that lifestyle sustainable for its sellers. The problem is, so far, it hasn’t been all that effective.
“Our vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice,” reads the mission statement on the company’s website. A better slogan, though, might be this comment from a recent members’ forum: “Live and let live and let’s sell some shit.” It’s not particularly romantic, but it certainly gets to the point.