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Etsy slashes almost a quarter of its staff
- k3oni 9y agoEtsy should go back at what they did initially and support the craftsmen instead of the china imports, maybe that would help bring them back on track.
- lbotos 9y agoI mean, Isn't that what they are doing? Shrinking workforce in theory "refocusing" which is code for "we don't need all these people if we are targeting a smaller market"?
- tyingq 9y agoMaybe. If not, they wouldn't be the first company to slash jobs while at the same time expanding customer/supplier base.
- acomjean 9y agoProbably too late as going back would likely reduce revenues. Handcrafted goods are expensive and slow and hard to police the sellers. Its a shame, because it was such a good idea to have a marketplace for people to sell stuff without the pain of setting up an online website/shop. Though some independents are now are using the squarespace/shoppify....etc.
- pawelk 9y agoI think that in Europe DaWanda is what Etsy could have been.
- perseusprime11 9y agoHere's a contrarian point of view: What if they do embrace China imports, get acquired by Alibaba and become from a front of artistic goods made in China.
- rhizome 9y agoDoesn't Amazon already have a lock on all that?
- wmeredith 9y agoAmazon's "lock on all of that" has pretty much ruined their brand from a retail seller standpoint. They're catalogue is overrun with garbage and counterfeits. It's quickly becoming eBay. I used to look at stuff in brick and mortar stores and then buy from Amazon. Now I look on Amazon for research and buy from brick and mortar stores so I know I'm not buying Chinese counterfeit garbage.
- rhizome 9y agoNo arguments there, but to be clear I was speaking primarily to the Alibaba -> FBA pipeline.
- gutnor 9y agoEtsy is based on selling handmade/artisan stuff. They can get away selling mass market stuff because of the reputation they earned with actual artisans at the beginning. Your strategy would be to get full steam becoming a front for Alibaba, fooling your users for long enough so that eventually Alibaba buys you. Problem is why would Alibaba do that ? By that stage you have a toxic brand: at any time, if a enough ripped off users make some noise, you are done forever. The best move for Alibaba, assuming they are interesting in building a Chinese artisan store, is to simply destroy Etsy with "Cut out the middle man, buy Etsy chinese mass market stuff cheap directly at the source on Alibaba. Or if you are interested in the genuine chinese art, check out our new dedicated store. Click on the following link to see all the process and check we put in place to make sure it is genuine handmade, not found in a super market good."
- madamelic 9y agoThis seems like the 'bubble' deflating. Not so much a bang, more of a fizzle as "the big kids" come in and cut deeply. That and investors keeping out of seed-stage funding because it has gotten so bloated by everyone wanting their own startup. I've seen Genius, Etsy, Uber... etc. It seems like a lot more startups are getting shook up and cut down.
- adventured 9y agoEtsy looks to be just fine. Sales grew 33% for 2016 vs 2015. Their operating loss is down to a very small trickle at $2m for the latest quarter. To go with $275m in cash. They appear to have a very nice business that's trading for a reasonable four times sales and likely heading toward profitability. What's the problem? Cutting bloat is exactly what they should be doing, it'll drive them to profitability faster.
- LoSboccacc 9y agoit's still in a very precarious position - if they open too much to resellers and large manufacturers people will go back to the more convenient alternative - amazon.
- treehau5 9y agoMore convenient, better experience, better search, better customer support, better shipping, more reviews, etc. etc. I know this is a dead horse here but Etsy needs to go back to it's roots or die. I would use eBay or alibaba before Etsy if they want to sell cheaply manufactured goods.
- huebnerob 9y agoThere's no reason why the cheaply made goods couldn't be their "day job", funding the true passion of supporting the creative entrepreneur. What would be concerning is if they see it as anything more than a way to pay the bills.
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- JustAnotherPat 9y agoSeems like a sinking ship for anyone there involved in software especially since they like to blame their tech and poor search for a lot of their problems.
- perseusprime11 9y agoMorale is very low currently. Not much confidence in the business.
- Justin_K 9y agoI lost interest in Etsy when I saw a bunch of manufactured crap I could by anywhere else. There was a turning point where Etsy became more of this than original, personally crafted items.
- learc83 9y agoI remember hearing that Etsy had an unusually large number of women working on the development team. I wonder how this layoff is going to affect that? Will they keep up their diversity initiatives, or do they consider that more of a luxury? I also read that they were also hiring a lot of bootcamp grads. It would be interesting to see the percentage of layoffs coming from bootcamps.
- rpazyaquian 9y agoThe diversity ratio is likely not going to be affected just by some people being laid off. I wouldn't expect it to change or to have been a factor in this.
- hinkley 9y agoIn times of stress, people tend to regress.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago> Will they keep up their diversity initiatives, or do they consider that more of a luxury? if they need to cut cost, they should start firing males, if anything, right?
- geofft 9y agoYes. This is economically rational, as Alan Greenspan pointed out in 1983: > ... the senior staff, including Miss Eickhoff, Judith Mackey and Lucille Wu, is mostly female. Mr. Greenspan explains the gender bias with the free-market pragmatism that has become his hallmark: "I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economists were cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: It gives us better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women."
- 086421357909764 9y agoBy that statement though, you're implying that men and women aren't paid equally within Etsy. Which is against the whole of diversity and equal pay for equal work campaign isn't it?
- johnbellone 9y agoI didn't see any numbers on what departments were the most affected, but to my friends at Etsy looking for roles in automation/infrastructure engineering please reach out!
- strict9 9y agoWill echo others regarding China imports, but one last hope to bring me back to their marketplace is a revamp of the review system. After spending thousands of dollars on furniture, waiting a month for the guy to make it, and another two weeks to ship, I had maybe a few days to leave a review for something I spent a lot of money on. With this policy, reviews are for first impressions only. And I won't be coming back. Maybe it's in place to prevent review extortion, but a time limit (especially for goods made on demand) isn't the way to do it.
- timdeneau 9y agoThey used to email prompt you for reviews, or prompt you for reviews whenever you signed in. Now they don’t do either, and even if I manually check the backlog of orders, the review time windows have all expired. So I never review anything anymore. Seems like a strange decision. I don’t understand how that is helping buyers or sellers.
- strict9 9y agoForgot they used to do that. The receipt emails also fail to mention the time limit policy, causing many more people to miss their chance. For one-off handmade products, reviews are more important than most other marketplaces. The time limit also prevents you from calling out fraudulent import resellers when you later discover the fraud.
- the-dude 9y ago> The time limit also prevents you from calling out fraudulent import resellers when you later discover the fraud. Which may be the actual intended consequence.
- coldpie 9y agoI wanted to leave a review after owning an item for a few months, to get an impression for how well it held up and how I liked it. Finally, I was happy with it, and went to leave a review only to be told I couldn't?!? Why on Earth do they have that policy?
- 20years 9y agoI tried using Etsy only to have them close my shop due to my products "not being handcrafted" according to them. These were small things that I 3D printed and people were actually buying. They shut me down but allowed similar endless China produced products to stay. They were not too happy when I pointed out those China knockoffs. They also kept my money hostage from the sales I made. I will never again use or trust Etsy and I discourage every small seller I know that makes custom things to stay away.
- 5ilv3r 9y agoWhere should we go? I make little things frequently and friends have been telling me to start an etsy shop, but stories like this keep me away.
- psadri 9y agoSounds like an opportunity.
- menzoic 9y agohttps://www.amazon.com/Handmade https://www.amazon.com/Handmade
- desireco42 9y agoI love Amazon, but they will not be in any better situation there then it was at Etsy. New platform is needed.
- mdorazio 9y agoHandmade is actually worse than Etsy for this. I tried creating a Handmade account with the same products I sell on Etsy and Amazon basically said they weren't handmade enough. If you're not making jewelry or textiles, don't get your hopes up.
- nevon 9y agoI used to work for a company called Tictail (https://tictail.com https://tictail.com) that promotes upcoming brands. If you're anywhere in the fashion, home, jewelry and accessories kind of space, it might be a good fit. Check it out.
- mi100hael 9y agoI wonder if that includes the bike-pedaling office composter.
- bogomipz 9y agoIn case anyone is wondering: https://blog.etsy.com/news/2012/office-ecology-composting-at-etsy/ https://blog.etsy.com/news/2012/office-ecology-composting-at...
- socrates1998 9y agoI have just heard a gradual declining of Etsy's quality and creator service of the last year or two. Their reluctance to crack down on Chinese crap along with being very unhelpful to it's creators are the two biggest issues. I mean, I get that a tech company would struggle with service to it's sellors, that's pretty normal, but if your brand is "handmade quality", then why the hell would you allow Chinese trash?
- draw_down 9y agoGrowth, baby, growth!
- creepydata 9y agoChinese trash is $$$$$. It's hard to resist a stream of very easy money (in the short term at least).
- lkrubner 9y agoThere was a stretch, I think 3 to 5 years ago, when it seemed that Etsy was on a hiring spree -- lots and lots of recruiters were reaching out to me and asking "Would you like to work for Etsy?" I was intrigued because I used to live in Brooklyn, just a few blocks from Etsy is. So if I worked there, I could have biked to work in about 10 minutes. That would have been cool. But every time I asked about the tech, I was disappointed. They wanted me to come in and work on a bunch of PHP code. When I asked about the details, from the hiring manager, I was told that it was, basically, a big monolithic PHP thing. I've no idea if they later moved to microservices, but I have been traumatized by a few too many encounters with horrendous blobs of PHP. For me, its become a bit of a heuristic. If a company is apparently working with a big blob of PHP, I am wary. I need to hear very good things about that company, to offset that wariness. More recently I've read criticisms of their search system. At the risk of indulging in "confirmation bias", I'll say this (bad search) is exactly what I would have predicted, based on what I'd heard 3 to 5 years ago.
- nikanj 9y agoFor me, it's the opposite actually. "We have a monolithic php thing" seems to signal "We made an MVP, found traction, and have been too busy to start from scratch". In contrast, "We have ultramodern microservices" is depressingly often code for "there's no real business here, so we have all the time in the world to polish the tech". With the former using "old, boring" tools, as they have been battle-proven time and again, and the latter using $dailyhype, as that's the thing that looks best on your CV right now. I guess this comes down to personal preferences, and whether you value the tech environment, or the business environment. I'd rather do unexciting work in a profitable company, than exciting work in a company with a writing on the wall.
- dmode 9y agoEtsy is a company that needed to stay private
- CodeWriter23 9y agoWe have a winner!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jbob2000 9y agoEtsy is looking for a buyer.
- CodeWriter23 9y agoAs they do all day every day http://m.nasdaq.com/symbol/etsy http://m.nasdaq.com/symbol/etsy
- upbeatlinux 9y agoWhy not initiate a share buy back, continue to trim the fat and go private? A return to their roots is necessary rather than trying to balance the share holder value of their B Corp status.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoMaybe twitter will watch and learn. They have some similar problems.
- Asparagirl 9y agoYes, but their crap products overwhelming their ecosystem tend to be Russian, not Chinese.
- rockmeamedee 9y agoA lot of negative nancies in this thread. I'm not here for kicking people while they're down. But didn't they have a layoff a month ago? Isn't there a management saying that goes something like "If you're going to eat shit, eat enough so you only have to do it once", specifically about layoffs? Etsy engineers (and other workers) reading this, I wish you good luck! May you survive and thrive through tough times.
- jroseattle 9y agoI remember when this article about the Etsy engineering department came out on Techcrunch 3 years ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9481377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9481377 The items that jumped out at me: > The company owns and operates its hardware and networks in its own datacenter. > The company has 685 employees of which approximately a third are engineers. > It wanted to know how Hadoop worked, and the only way to do that was to bring it in-house and figure it out. As a means to an end, this is a _really_ expensive way of operating nowadays. And when the business isn't rolling, these costs become magnified (and the associated operation vulnerable.)
- njyx 9y agoI wouldn't necessarily agree with that. It depends on scale and the skills available to you. Yes, amazon and co do a good job of pushing down cloud costs, but you still need people to manage these services. Also it depends WHEN you build things. Redshift for example is now pretty viable and potentially more cost effective than what Etsy does. 2-3 years ago that very likely wasn't the case. I'm not saying Etsy doesn't have somewhat higher system costs than others but I doubt it's the cause of their issues.
- jroseattle 9y ago> It depends on scale and the skills available to you. Skills -- yes. Scale? That's kind of the point, nowadays. You don't need a large staff to accomplish scale. > I doubt it's the cause of their issues. Their eng/ops approach wasn't the cause of any business issues, AFAIK. That's why my comment is directed around what happens when business performance suffers -- you start looking for cost reductions.
- amazon 9y agoI have only had positive experiences working with Etsy but a lot of other people I've met have had their businesses shut down and their funds locked on the site. Incredibly shady especially since most of their products were legitimate crafts they made. Hopefully they get their act together because there really is no replacement.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y agoI know this will cost me mucho karma, but what I hear: self promoting excellent technology, best practice ops blog posts, a/b testing, poster child for product management [1] and then after years of excellence a sudden product failure (reviews, China, ...), CEO kicked out for failing and slashing staff in several rounds. To me this looks like focusing on the wrong things. I wonder that the CEO discussed with the CTO and VP Product over the years. We'll see if I have to replace Nokia with Etsy in my "Focus" conference talks. [1] Etsy is a database webfrontend not SpaceX Edit: John Allspaw, famous for blameless postmortems, Linkedin profile says his CTO gig at Etsy ended May 2017.
- apapli 9y agoSpot on.
- allover 9y agoYou think the tech leads that lead their best practice ops & a/b test teams should have been somehow doing something to counter amazon.com/handmade or should have been telling Product not to bother with the non-core products the article mentions? I don't see how the 2 are related, 'focusing on the wrong things' seems like a huge oversimplification. Your post reads like schadenfreude. 'They thought they were so smart with their best practice ops ...".
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago"You think the tech leads ..." Yes. "schadenfreude" No. It's just a pattern we can see over and over again. I've worked for some companies that showed that pattern and consulted some which sat in that trap. And it looks like focusing on tech excellence - and I assume they are excellent - didn't help Etsy with growing their revenue. Is Etsy a tech company? Or are they a retail-oriented market place? Did they focus too much on technical/product excellence? Many companies I have seen have a wrong selfimage. Did they solve the wrong problems? These are the questions I'm interested in.
- allover 9y ago