Etsy Welcomes Manufacturers to Artisanal Fold

Etsy&#x27;s move into manufacturers is an error IMHO.<p>Etsy would be better served by shoring up its advantage in craftpeople sellers, including artisinal products, one of a kind items, and handmade creations.<p>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&#x2F;search has decreased, and gamed listings by knockoff manufacturers are squeezing out legitimate handcrafters.<p>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.<p>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:<p>1) Significantly improve discoverability&#x2F;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.<p>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.

I used to be an Etsy customer. Now the site has turned into eBay but with worse filtering&#x2F;categorisation than eBay itself (and a smaller selection).<p>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&#x2F;niche.<p>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.<p>Now, being realistic, there was always mass produced items on Etsy. But it was like an 80&#x2F;20 thing (20% being mass produced) and it was pretty easy to tell who was what.<p>Now if you go on the site it is like 10&#x2F;90 (90%+ are mass produced). And worse still it is too difficult to find anything that is not, the &quot;Handmade&quot; checkbox is a lie.<p>So now Etsy is another eBay. That&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;m reluctant to second-guess this move. But as a consumer, I want an exclusively artisanal marketplace.<p>If you&#x27;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.

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 &quot;perfect&quot; hand made item. Most artists in Anglo-Saxon world can&#x27;t make a living - they either have jobs and do painting &#x2F; sculpting as a hobby, or they turn to crafts (I&#x27;m a three-year postgrad trained sculpture artist - can I make you a gate for your driveway?)<p>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&#x27;s a fairly common and lucrative trade, and some photos of New York can be found in a million IKEA furnished homes.<p>But if IKEA stocked genuine, hand painted one offs, even in the volumes needed, would they go at say, 500 to 1000 bucks?<p>(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)<p>So, not disparaging etsy, but my &quot;mental smell test&quot;, highly biased that it is, tells me that 1000 bucks for a painting against 750 for a sofa won&#x27;t go well at the mass market - and it won&#x27;t go well in a mass market web site either.<p>Etsy is a Walmart, stocked high with that &quot;perfect distressed framed mirror&quot;, and wondering where the impedance mismatch is coming from.

&quot;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.&quot;<p>The last sentence seems awfully weasel-worded to me, especially since the first sentence says that, for compliance, Etsy will just take the manufacturer&#x27;s word for it.<p>It definitely reminds me of the controversial &quot;but we&#x27;re just a platform&quot; stance of, e.g., Uber.

If you have a hand-made product, and it suddenly explodes in popularity, it&#x27;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.

Well now that means that Etsy is just a marketplace for people with quirky ideas and a number of knockoff competitors.<p>I&#x27;m not entirely certain I like that.