Etsy made a pretty groundbreaking announcement last week. Beginning in January of 2014 sellers on the site will be allowed to hire staff, have someone else ship their goods, and sell items they produce with manufacturing partners.
After watching the press conference I wrote a blog post explaining the new policies and questioning what the word handmade really means. The post was widely shared and generated a heated discussion in the comments. Is Etsy selling out? Will truly handmade goods get beat out by the competition when they can’t compete on price? Or is Etsy just allowing creative businesses to be profitable and remain on the platform? What is the true motivation behind this shift?
A few hours after the post went up, I was contacted by Etsy to discuss these ideas further and that led to today’s podcast. In this 35 minute conversation, I talk with Vanessa Bertozzi, the Director of Etsy Wholesale, about the impetus for the policy change, what Etsy is hoping to achieve, and where Etsy sees itself headed. Vanessa has worked at Etsy since its inception. Prior to her current position she was the Director of Community and Education at Etsy and the Editorial Director responsible for launching the Etsy blog. She’s been there since the early days and has a lot to share about the site’s new direction.
The ideas presented in this conversation are relevant to all makers and small business owners as well as to customers of artisan-made goods. I hope you enjoy the interview and I encourage you to come back to this post and leave questions or comments for Vanessa or myself. Let’s keep the discussion going.
Thank you and enjoy the show:
Thanks for doing this interview. It has been very needed.
It helps to clarify things. The big thing is still the term
‘manufactured’ and ‘factory made’ and what fear that brings up
because of the reseller problem. Lets hope everyone prospers,
the small seller is not lost and that Etsy can stay true to their ideals.
Etsy can not redefine “Handmade” as they can not redefine “Transparency” or “Clarity”. This policy does nothing to remove gray areas but creates a dark room where Etsy can & will do as it pleases. Rob’s original vision was not to promote “mindfulness” it was to create a venue for Handmade. HANDMADE not hands made.
What buyers and sellers want is honesty, not refined honesty but the truth.
As a seller I want to know how a Buyer using Etsy’s current broken search & curated browse which favors trending & multiples in items , how will my OOAK Vintage items be found against Factories? Do you even care at this point? As of January my shop will close on Etsy and I will sell 100% on Zibbet.
So eloquently put and my thoughts exactly. The whole scenario makes me so sad…
Thank you so much for this podcast and great website!
I agree. The Search and Browse does not work well. I have trouble finding shops by name almost every time and have to go back into Google to find it.
As an artist, I cannot compete with manufactured items, which could be similar to my work, yet much cheaper. It seems artists with true handmade goods are being punished for Etsy’s loosey-gooseyness in allowing vintage and supplies to the degree what they don’t know how to define themselves.
If a successful artist designs patterns and manages a staff, good for him or her. Truly. They could move on and not use Etsy as a platform. Or Etsy could have created a new site for these types of items to level the playing field.
It’s about money. Not about Etsy’s vision. I would like them to thrive but not at my expense.
Thanks, Paul. There is certainly a lot of fear around that issue.
Moving to a different platform is probably the best solution because it sounds like you’re really disenchanted with Etsy.
You’re welcome, Allison. Thank you for visiting.
I would agree about issues with the search function. I use Google to search for things on Etsy. Nothing beats the power of Google for search.
Thank you Abby. It is best, if staying means being “enchanted” – for me the spell is broken.
Etsy is all about spin. They totally lack the transparency they like to talk about so much about. They mute their buyers and sellers for having an opinion. They alienate people when they treat them that way. I loved etsy and now I have lost all respect for them, based on a drip drip of passive aggression towards its customers (sellers and buyers) over months. This last announcement is only the final straw. It doesn’t surprise me that they contacted you, its about damage limitation. The company that doesn’t have a customer care phone line, phoned up sellers to chat to them after they seemed to show dissent on the forums, buttered them up and then sent them off to do their work. Except some sellers didn’t comply and spoke of it on the forums. They are now probably among the permamuted (and what sort of thing is that! It’s a disgrace is what it is!)
Etsy has lost it’s moral compass. In favor of greed and investor responsibility the small seller is quickly becoming a dinosaur. There is no room for them. Long time employees who spoke quite differently about the etsy mission and welcomed the unique individual seller have sold out to the company line.
Actually all 400 employees say they exact same thing. This was in the planning for over a year. There were secret meetings with sellers who already used factories. The PR spin has long been in place.
One such seller highlighted for her “Fall River” sewing company said there were 5 seamstresses who “loved” making hand made. Actually the company has an 80,000 square foot space with many many hourly sewers who hunch over machines all day. One quick call to the factory confirmed quite the opposite of what the etsy seller says. But, etsy doesn’t vet and sellers can say anything they like. Who is going to check?
Handmade on etsy may not be completely dead, but it is buried.
Etsy has lost it’s moral compass. In favor of greed and investor responsibility the small seller is quickly becoming a dinosaur. There is no room for them. Long time employees who spoke quite differently about the etsy mission and welcomed the unique individual seller have sold out to the company line.
Actually all 400 employees say they exact same thing. This was in the planning for over a year. There were secret meetings with sellers who already used factories. The PR spin has long been in place.
One such seller highlighted for her “Fall River” sewing company said there were 5 seamstresses who “loved” making hand made. Actually the company has an 80,000 square foot space with many many hourly sewers who hunch over machines all day. One quick call to the factory confirmed quite the opposite of what the etsy seller says. But, etsy doesn’t vet and sellers can say anything they like. Who is going to check?
Handmade on etsy may not be completely dead, but it is buried.
The great and powerful Etsy has deleted all blog comments that do not agree with allowing factories to sell on their site.
That is not journalism, it is Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. shame on etsy.
I hope you do not do the same.
It’s clear that Etsy’s policies and behaviors really infuriate you (and you’re not alone). To me that says it’s time to move on, away from all of this negative energy. Fortunately now there are so many other ways to buy and sell goods online that you don’t have to participate in the Etsy community in any way if you choose not to.
Etsy is a business, not a platform for honest journalism. I choose not to delete comments that disagree with my point of view. They have made a different choice. I think energy is well spent building an independent platform, both for telling what one sees as the truth and for selling handmade goods.
I have a question about Authorship. A while back there was discussion on this blog about patterns created by a designer and whether that designer would allow the purchaser to buy the pattern and then make items for resale. There are so many designers that allow this but how does this fall under this new policy. There are a lot of Etsy sellers who do reproduce patterns with the okay of the designer and offer these goods for resale. Most if not all designers ask that they be given credit either in the description or on any tags etc and most sellers do.
So these sellers are not the “authours” of the design. Does that mean they can no longer sell their goods? I can see this impacting quite are lot of sellers on Etsy.
Mary Ann, this is such a great question. I think making something from a pattern and selling that item with the pattern designer’s permission will still be allowed on Etsy. You are correct, however, in pointing out this gray area about the definition of “authorship.” That gray area is so complex. I don’t have a more full answer for you, but my hunch is that things will proceed as they always have when it comes this particular issue. Thank you for raising this!
But it should still have honest intentions and integrity at its heart as all business should. They built theirs using handmade sellers and are now duping them and dumping them and silencing their dissenting voices. They are still using the reputation that sellers built up of a site that celebrates handmade excellence, to sell that which is not. The plan is to mislead the buyer about what etsy stands for and then what they actually buy. It’s duplicitous and deceitful on the one hand and possibly illegal on the other. If etsy is changing, it is entitled, but it must be clear to all about what it is changing to. When those changes involves betrayal of sellers who built it up and buyers who gave their loyalty, without a backwards glance then I cannot condone the behaviour.
Here is a thread that shows buyers how ridiculous etsy is becoming.
https://www.etsy.com/uk/teams/18091/new-guidelines/discuss/13159791/page/1
While I completely understand the need to make sure policies cover artisans whose work simply cannot be completely in the home or studio, Etsy has a long way to go concerning its policies. For me, the issue is not about what Etsy’s policies are. It’s about Etsy being able and willing to manage their policies instead of making them and turning their backs and skipping off to dream up the next big thing.
Etsy makes policy and then turns its back on the ramifications of those policies. For example, they say they don’t allow services, but they accept resume writers. I can’t offer hand or machine quilting as a service but I can offer resume writing? In both cases, the customer provides all the material to be organized. In quilting,at least, there IS handmaking going on. In resume writing, it’s just editing. Etsy constantly says one thing and does another because they constantly define their own terms on the fly. And they have admitted their definitions are not standard english dictionary definitions – you know, the ones everyone but them understands and is operating under. This is not good business.
If you make terms of use a legally binding agreement, then everyone has to be agreed on what those terms mean. You can’t just make up a new definition for the words later! Well, Etsy can and does.
Etsy has not been able to enforce its old policies so why should I believe they can make sure their business is running in accordance with the new ones? Their new mission is to “re-imagine”. Yes, that’s their mission verb. Their mission is to sit around dreaming up new schemes, not managing their business. Etsy needs to take care of their business and get it cleaned out and on track before they open up any more new possibilities to maintain and manage.
Certainly all businesses should have honest intentions and integrity, as should all people. But if you feel that a business doesn’t it is probably best to move on and develop your own platform. There are so many ways to sell handmade goods online now, easily and affordably and inexpensively.
Online services change their terms of service on a pretty regular basis. It’s part of doing business. As a user, it’s up to us to decide whether we are okay with the new terms when they are published, or if we are no longer okay with the new terms. Facebook, Google, Pinterest and Etsy all change their terms of service, sometimes every few months. As a seller, or buyer, on Etsy if you feel the site is no longer honest and ethical it’s probably time to focus on building your own platform.
Of course, they can change their terms of use, and the platform is fine and I am okay with the terms AS THEY ARE WRITTEN – but not necessarily as Etsy later interprets and changes the meanings of the words I have agreed to. It’s simply not okay to use standard english words that are agreed upon by all speakers of that language, and then simply say – oh, what WE mean by the word ‘handmade’ or ‘collective’ or ‘authorship’ is….
You can’t expect people to enter into agreement and then change the meaning of the agreement. it’s unprofessional and technically, it’s one-sidedly illegal. I can’t sudenly change the meaning of the words in the TOU and hold Etsy to my made-up meanings can I? I’m saying that’s what they do. And they don’t have to. They have a fine platform and just need to stop trying to hipster themselves right into litigation by accident of misleading word use.