20 ms·

Inside the Revolution at Etsy

135 points by e15ctr0n 9y ago

Exo_Tartarus 9y ago
"Employees shared their emotions freely, often crying at the office." Lol!
- sctb 9y ago
  Please take a look at the guidelines, which ask us to comment civilly and substantively: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
jzl 9y ago
"With sales up, Etsy is highlighting successful sellers with a series of videos. But not all users are happy. For years, sellers and buyers have complained that as Etsy has grown more popular, mass-produced goods have flooded the site, making it harder to find handmade items, and harder for sellers to make a living." This. I went on Etsy recently for the first time in a few years looking for a few different handmade items. They were nearly impossible to find amid a flood of mass-produced commercial items. Etsy is nearly indistinguishable from Michael's or Joann's art supply stores, or worse. I have no intention of shopping there again.
- dailyvijeos 9y ago
  Yuck. :( Sellers need a “Maker Strike” like YouTube channels to keep folks honest. Also, raise the bar such that sellers have to put in mental, creative and time investment and are cut out if they repeatedly sell junk. Can’t just sign up as a seller the same day and spam stuff from AliBaba and say it’s “handmade” or “vintage.” Next, have a buyer to seller/creator feedback method that influences item ranking so junk is pushed down and out. Maybe use AI/ML/DL to spot product descriptions and images that are copied or similar to determine if items are new, mass-manufactured products... and, sure have an appeals process. PS: My disabled mom makes handmade jewelry that people beg to pay money for, but I’m hesitant to recommend Etsy considering the diluted execution of the original business model.
  - SolaceQuantum 9y ago
    Have you looked into Etsy alternatives like Shopify or storenvy?
  - rhizome 9y ago
    Also, raise the bar such that sellers have to put in mental, creative and time investment and are cut out if they repeatedly sell junk. This train left the station years ago: https://www.wired.com/2014/04/why-etsys-future-depends-on-leaving-behind-the-simply-handmade/ https://www.wired.com/2014/04/why-etsys-future-depends-on-le...
  - wyclif 9y ago
    Based on my experience with Etsy, I believe you are both correct. What needs to happen as a directive and embraced as a cultural value at Etsy is for the people now running the company to drop a massive, crushing hammer on low-quality, Alibaba-sourced crap. Turn the entire place upside down. I can't predict what would happen, but it couldn't possibly be worse than what's going on there now and it could very well get some of the consumer goodwill back.
    - jzl 9y ago
      100% agree!
  - tomcam 9y ago
    > PS: My disabled mom makes handmade jewelry that people beg to pay money for, but I’m hesitant to recommend Etsy considering the diluted execution of the original business model. Wut. You think it's a good thing to cut her off from the best venue on the web for her work because of an altered business model?
- ghaff 9y ago
  It's hard to see how you scale what Etsy was originally. See also eBay's transformation away from "the world's biggest flea market." Given globalization and cheap Asian manufacturing, the only way to keep things relatively "pure" is human curation--and even that will be gamed and doesn't scale anyway. Of course, there's a lot of mass produced knicknacks even among "crafts" sold at fairs and stores. But it tends to not be quite so much mass-produced and crappy.
  - enraged_camel 9y ago
    This is why the expectation of infinite growth is not a good thing. Lack of scalability was Etsy’s unique value proposition and competitive advantage. They gave it up in order to grow and as a result have become indistinguishable from many chain art supply stores.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      >Lack of scalability was Etsy’s unique value proposition and competitive advantage. In the same way that many small-scale sites/stores that curate contents can be said to have unique value proposition and competitive advantage. That's not a knock on them by the way. Many are good at what they do and add value. Not everything needs to be Internet-scale but you sort of have to be one or the other.
      - PakG1 9y ago
        If you IPO, you have no choice but to achieve and increase Internet scale. Your share price will suffer if you don't because when you IPO, your investors matter more than your other stakeholders. If you don't want to be a slave to an insatiable hunger for growth by investors, don't IPO. For that matter, don't get investors who expect an exit either. Yeah, you miss out on the big get rich exit, but at least you get to stay true to your original values. Be content to stay a larger than usual lifestyle business. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
    - shostack 9y ago
      Then you have an interesting challenge. Businesses are never at equilibrium. So if you're not growing, you're shrinking. There may be lulls where things are flat, but you never want to be flat. Likewise, if you resist growing and have competition, they will see the opening you leave, continue growing, and then look to use that leverage to buy or kill your business.
- drb91 9y ago
  I hear this every time Etsy comes up, and I’ll admit the attitude confuses me. 1) without etsy, you really would be stuck with Michaels quality crafts. I’m pretty sure I can’t buy a solid oak spice rack from michaels of any decent quality. Or a retro pipe box, or a certain type of mens jewelry... you get the picture. 2. Nobody else is trying to corner the market Etsy originally carved out for itself. Amazon, Jet, Ebay, and Alibaba all are terrible for showing craftwork rather than a mass produced consumer piece with significant stock. If amazon had an etsy clone that improved on it at all, I would totally split my patronage, but there’s realistically no competitor online. 3. You can actually buy locally and keep your money mostly local. Places like amazon make this extremely difficult to figure out and prioritize. 4. Many etsy shop owners use etsy as a shop front, not as a sales driver. Assuming the main point of etsy is to buy a great product directly from the buyer will probably lead to shitty experiences. This is much more like a flea market, complete with regret purchases. It is not a convenient online shop for avoiding regret. Am I asking you to excuse etsy’s issues? Hell no. But you’re also not addressing massive parts about how the site functions for both its sellers and consumers.
  - jzl 9y ago
    Everything you just said is exactly what I used to love about Etsy. And I'm sure that there is still some amount of love to be had for it, for those reasons. But finding the kinds of items you just described is exactly the problem. Sure, if there is something really specific I want, I would consider checking Etsy first and if I found a locally crafted item, I'd be a happy camper. But I used to love browsing it, and the browsing experience is ruined or at least heavily degraded (depending on the category) thanks to all the mass produced items.
- SolaceQuantum 9y ago
  It still works depending on what kind of item you’re looking for. Specific tea blends, cold process soaps, incense dipped to order, and specific kinda of pottery have all been successful in my getting handmade stuff I want. What kind of stuff are you looking for?
  - jzl 9y ago
    I was gift shopping, and was just browsing topic by topic. In the past I had done so and stumbled across all sorts of amazing handmade items without much digging at all. Look at the landing page for "Home & Living" and you'll see what I mean: https://www.etsy.com/c/home-and-living?ref=catnav-891 https://www.etsy.com/c/home-and-living?ref=catnav-891 I could see how some specific topics might still have more handmade items than not.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      To my eye, most of the items on that page look pretty mass-produced or mass-produced + a personalization step. There's nothing wrong with that. I sometimes buy mass-produced "craftwork." Just because a wind chime (or whatever) is produced in a factory at some scale doesn't suddenly make it ugly. And it's not like the average thing being sold at a genuine craft fair is attractive. That said, I have too much stuff and I just tend to be uninterested in buying more even if there's nothing wrong per se with individual pieces.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  Yeah, this is a real problem. My wife sells via Etsy (leather handbags, all handmade), and this is something we've seen happen. But it's disheartening to hear from potential customers that they won't shop on the site because of this reputation. Unfortunately, this is not new, and not the first time this has been discussed. This has been going on for years now. And frankly, Etsy is still the best place for this sort of thing. So my wife sticks to marketing and directing people directly to her Etsy store. Just a question: would you not buy something via Etsy (as in, found something you liked some other method but had to buy it through Etsy), or just not shop using Etsy?
  - jzl 9y ago
    I would definitely buy there if I found myself there directly from an artist/crafter, like if I first saw something in person at a fair. I have nothing against the site. But most mass produced items I would rather just get from Amazon or go to a brick and mortar to see in person, if possible. When I said "I have no intention of shopping there again," I guess I really meant "I have no intent to go browsing for items there again, like I used to."
dailyvijeos 9y ago
I wish eBay, AliBaba or Amazon would buy Etsy and integrate the site well while keeping management and the right amount of operations independent. Etsy is, right now, a dingy in the storm of a double-ended marketplace without the reach of the 800 million pound cargo-ship empire gorilla. Otherwise, a smaller platform will likely buy it for an “undisclosed sum” and kill it, or investors will throw in the towel. Maybe that’s what he’s doing: reducing liabilities (ie salaries) and making revenue look good to spark M&A interest, while also considering survivability without an exit.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- spraak 9y ago
  > Otherwise, a smaller platform will likely buy it for an “undisclosed sum” and kill it It seems much more likely that eBay, AliBaba or Amazon would kill it if one of them bought it.
- jasonlotito 9y ago
  Amazon already does something like this for Handmade items. It's not exactly great. I know, because they reached out to my wife to get her to move stuff from Etsy to Amazon.
hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
The change in culture was written in from the moment they took VC funding. The only thing that matters in capitalist markets is shareholder returns, and anyone who takes outside funding should understand that. For all the talk of "doing good" and maintaining a strong corporate culture, if those things aren't contributing to the bottom line, they'll be axed.
- Domenic_S 9y ago
  Seems like just a mismatch in organization type. A capital-B Business cares deeply about the bottom line. An organization that primarily wants to "do good" and so forth is perhaps a non-profit or charity. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a non-profit or a charity, but that's certainly not what Etsy is. I get the tension between impacting the world for the better and keeping an ever-increasing number of lights on. It is an interesting tension.
  - hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
    My point is that if you are a capital-B business, but you also have majority control and do not need additional funding, you can make tradeoffs against your bottom line if it fits your values. Outside funders may give lip service to it, but they don't care shit about your values, and honestly I think it would be better if all sides acknowledged this instead of pretending this wasn't the case.
  - dorchadas 9y ago
    Honestly, that's the same kind of issue that Duolingo is running into. They're talking about offering the languages for free, but they're trying to run as a Business and make profit. Now it's led to a marked decrease in quality (which wasn't all that great to begin with) as they rush courses and throw in adds to compete with free competitors.
  - ryanbrunner 9y ago
    I don't think a business is incompatible with the idea of "doing good" at all - Etsy's problem wasn't that it's impossible to "do good" as a business, it's that the founders no longer owned the company completely, and the new owners were more interested in profit than doing good. If they had been a bootstrapped marketplace that never took outside funding, they'd be perfectly capable of continuing to put their mission at the level or even before profits.
rectang 9y ago
The contrasting perspectives at the end of the article stand out (I'm sure that's the intent of the reporter): "There's only so much wiggle room as a public company," said Mr. Stinchcomb, the early employee. "If you really want to build a company that works for people and the planet, capitalism isn’t the solution." ... "To all the people who say taking Etsy public was a mistake, I say that's ridiculous," Mr. Wilson said. "There are some people who will say, 'Well, it’s not right for me. I like the old culture.' Well, I'm sorry about that. Going public was the best thing that ever happened to this company." Mr. Wilson, the investor, is unwilling to accept that there may be other value systems besides his own, and other definitions of "best".
- heymijo 9y ago
  I would not want Fred Wilson within 100 miles of the board of any company I cared about. There are many reasons Twitter is a mess as a public company today and Fred Wilson as a disastrous early board member is one of them. People learn from their mistakes, but apparently Fred has not. "I have heard from quite a few founders that they read the book Hatching Twitter and came away thinking that they would not want to work with me. That sucks for me but I don’t regret anything I did or said in the events that were described in that book." [0] [0] https://www.quora.com/What-does-Fred-Wilson-think-about-Hatching-Twitter https://www.quora.com/What-does-Fred-Wilson-think-about-Hatc...
- mcfunley 9y ago
  I'm as ambivalent about capitalism as the next person. But Etsy is a lousy counterexample to the premise of combining success in business and progressive values. Current and former employees conflating the two is disappointing. Etsy grew rapidly and organically for a decade, and never figured out how to grow intentionally in an ROI-positive way. As a private company it was not particularly concerned with revenue per employee, and headcount expanded like a gas to fill available revenue. After going public it was way too slow to realize that this wasn't going to fool the public market. I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is. n.b. I worked for Etsy from 2007-2014. My own values force me to own this.
dboreham 9y ago
Curiously though, the long-term successful companies* seem to have found a balance between naked profit seeking and "good-ness", usually through either not being publicly traded at all, or by having a single very forceful leader e.g. In-n-out Burger, Costco, Starbucks, Apple. *Successful long term because ultimately seeking profit above all leads to reputational harm and resulting a downward spiral (or if lucky an oligopoly).
- WalterBright 9y ago
  > ultimately seeking profit above all leads to reputational harm and resulting a downward spiral (or if lucky an oligopoly) Not at all. If seeking profit leads to a downward spiral, then the managers are mistaken about how to seek profit. In particular, treating employees and customers well is an excellent strategy for making profits. For example, I asked a used car salesman acquaintance how to tell if a car dealership was reputable or not. He said it's easy - have they been in business more than 5 years? If they have, they are running on repeat business. Bad dealerships run out of suckers before 5 years.
  - nitwit005 9y ago
    This sort of assumes that the suckers eventually realize they were suckered. I don't have that much confidence in people's ability to do that.
- morgante 9y ago
  All those companies still recognize that they are businesses. They just recognize that having a positive image and treating employees well can be good business.
doiwin 9y ago
I didn't even know Etsy is a public traded company. What are some other companies that are basically 'a website' that are publically traded?
- astura 9y ago
  Plenty Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, Yahoo/Flickr/Tumblr, Baidu, Twitter, Netflix, eBay, Alibaba/AliExpress, PayPal, Rakuten,The Priceline Group (Priceline, kayak, etc), etc.
- nsp 9y ago
  Facebook, Zillow(I think), Twitter, Shopify, eBay, to name a couple
junkscience2017 9y ago
SJW + Gordon Gecko = Etsy ? Why would anyone expect this Frankenstein's monster to survive? Something has to give. You are either running a safe inclusive space or you are trying to rake in money. If you want to do inclusion, start a university. Not that it matters much, with 84% institutional ownership, Etsy management will have no problem finding some George Soros type who will be willing to lose a lot of other people's money in order to keep the torch burning for the right (or more appropriately, left) kind of political theme
morgante 9y ago
This has been a long time coming. Etsy always struck me as a company which was fundamentally a small business. They were never going to be an e-commerce giant and should have focused on keeping headcount manageable from the start. Instead I think most of the Etsy leadership and employees forgot that they were running a business at all. That's fine when you're riding on the back of a great business model with solid fundamentals (see most big tech companies), but it fails when you're running a niche business with low margins even in the best case.
- ordinaryperson 9y ago
  Agreed. Their business model was to sell handmade arts & crafts, but scaling that requires mass production, which by definition is not handmade. A paradox and, IMHO, a low ceiling on where Etsy can go. It's hard not to sound like a handlebar mustache villain when criticizing Etsy's original business practices, but work is work, not a therapy group. If employees find corporate governance so horrible, hey, they're free to start companies that align with their values. But maybe they'll prove me wrong, who knows.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
greendestiny_re 9y ago
Why couldn't Etsy limit the number of seller slots on the website and sell them to the highest bidding persons? Both increases the quality and provides the funding.
- eigenstuff 9y ago
  I just opened an Etsy a week ago. I was so broke I had to borrow $1 from a friend to finish paying for my listings. (I am no longer that broke, thanks Etsy.) Pretty sure that's a fantastic way to keep out the actual artisans/starving artists/craftspeople and only allow in the kind of people who can gather up the cash to stock up on tons of Alibaba garbage.
ggg9990 9y ago
Etsy did things way too well. An online crafts market should not have a well-known engineering team and blog -- they should be running a patchwork of shitty technology that crashes every month because they only hired one guy to run the website and they hired one too cheap. They simply way overshot the MVP for no business value. Then they had to scale up the business into factory-made crap to pay for the hugely scalable platform they had built.
karlkatzke 9y ago
tl;dr: You can run a socially responsible, human, ethical company in the current climate in the US, but it is nearly impossible to run one with outside investors who are not invested strongly in the company’s mission or who are not willing to settle for organic growth.
mhroth 9y ago
Sadly, I feel that the real issue here is that few people are willing to pay the real cost of individually produced, handmade products, enough to pay the person making them a honest living. We've all become so accustomed to economies of scale that few understand the amount of work required to actually build any trivial artifact of modern society.
corvallis 9y ago
My friends and I used to frequent Etsy to find unique, handmade or independently made accessories and home goods. We haven't been customers for a few years now. The most obvious and notable reason is that the site is full of stuff that does not meet the above criteria. It mostly has garbage from China/Alibaba with mass-produced jewelry/accessories and trinkets purporting to be handmade, as long as you don't look too closely. What is the point of Etsy anymore? It's become a small, pathetic clone of Ebay, Amazon, etc. I hope someone can start another company like what Etsy used to be - a marketplace for indie designers and craftspeople to sell a small volume of unique goods to people who are interested in supporting them and their work. No need to go public or raise massive capital. It can function perfectly well with a small crew to run the site and a tight marketing/publicity team. It would be nice if companies were okay with staying small, private, and making a modest profit consistently instead of getting into the growth rat race.

135 points by e15ctr0n 9y ago

Exo_Tartarus 9y ago

"Employees shared their emotions freely, often crying at the office." Lol!

sctb 9y ago
Please take a look at the guidelines, which ask us to comment civilly and substantively: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

jzl 9y ago

"With sales up, Etsy is highlighting successful sellers with a series of videos. But not all users are happy. For years, sellers and buyers have complained that as Etsy has grown more popular, mass-produced goods have flooded the site, making it harder to find handmade items, and harder for sellers to make a living." This. I went on Etsy recently for the first time in a few years looking for a few different handmade items. They were nearly impossible to find amid a flood of mass-produced commercial items. Etsy is nearly indistinguishable from Michael's or Joann's art supply stores, or worse. I have no intention of shopping there again.

dailyvijeos 9y ago
Yuck. :( Sellers need a “Maker Strike” like YouTube channels to keep folks honest. Also, raise the bar such that sellers have to put in mental, creative and time investment and are cut out if they repeatedly sell junk. Can’t just sign up as a seller the same day and spam stuff from AliBaba and say it’s “handmade” or “vintage.” Next, have a buyer to seller/creator feedback method that influences item ranking so junk is pushed down and out. Maybe use AI/ML/DL to spot product descriptions and images that are copied or similar to determine if items are new, mass-manufactured products... and, sure have an appeals process. PS: My disabled mom makes handmade jewelry that people beg to pay money for, but I’m hesitant to recommend Etsy considering the diluted execution of the original business model.
- SolaceQuantum 9y ago
  Have you looked into Etsy alternatives like Shopify or storenvy?
- rhizome 9y ago
  Also, raise the bar such that sellers have to put in mental, creative and time investment and are cut out if they repeatedly sell junk. This train left the station years ago: https://www.wired.com/2014/04/why-etsys-future-depends-on-leaving-behind-the-simply-handmade/ https://www.wired.com/2014/04/why-etsys-future-depends-on-le...
- wyclif 9y ago
  Based on my experience with Etsy, I believe you are both correct. What needs to happen as a directive and embraced as a cultural value at Etsy is for the people now running the company to drop a massive, crushing hammer on low-quality, Alibaba-sourced crap. Turn the entire place upside down. I can't predict what would happen, but it couldn't possibly be worse than what's going on there now and it could very well get some of the consumer goodwill back.
  - jzl 9y ago
    100% agree!
- tomcam 9y ago
  > PS: My disabled mom makes handmade jewelry that people beg to pay money for, but I’m hesitant to recommend Etsy considering the diluted execution of the original business model. Wut. You think it's a good thing to cut her off from the best venue on the web for her work because of an altered business model?
ghaff 9y ago
It's hard to see how you scale what Etsy was originally. See also eBay's transformation away from "the world's biggest flea market." Given globalization and cheap Asian manufacturing, the only way to keep things relatively "pure" is human curation--and even that will be gamed and doesn't scale anyway. Of course, there's a lot of mass produced knicknacks even among "crafts" sold at fairs and stores. But it tends to not be quite so much mass-produced and crappy.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  This is why the expectation of infinite growth is not a good thing. Lack of scalability was Etsy’s unique value proposition and competitive advantage. They gave it up in order to grow and as a result have become indistinguishable from many chain art supply stores.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >Lack of scalability was Etsy’s unique value proposition and competitive advantage. In the same way that many small-scale sites/stores that curate contents can be said to have unique value proposition and competitive advantage. That's not a knock on them by the way. Many are good at what they do and add value. Not everything needs to be Internet-scale but you sort of have to be one or the other.
    - PakG1 9y ago
      If you IPO, you have no choice but to achieve and increase Internet scale. Your share price will suffer if you don't because when you IPO, your investors matter more than your other stakeholders. If you don't want to be a slave to an insatiable hunger for growth by investors, don't IPO. For that matter, don't get investors who expect an exit either. Yeah, you miss out on the big get rich exit, but at least you get to stay true to your original values. Be content to stay a larger than usual lifestyle business. Can't have your cake and eat it too.
  - shostack 9y ago
    Then you have an interesting challenge. Businesses are never at equilibrium. So if you're not growing, you're shrinking. There may be lulls where things are flat, but you never want to be flat. Likewise, if you resist growing and have competition, they will see the opening you leave, continue growing, and then look to use that leverage to buy or kill your business.
drb91 9y ago
I hear this every time Etsy comes up, and I’ll admit the attitude confuses me. 1) without etsy, you really would be stuck with Michaels quality crafts. I’m pretty sure I can’t buy a solid oak spice rack from michaels of any decent quality. Or a retro pipe box, or a certain type of mens jewelry... you get the picture. 2. Nobody else is trying to corner the market Etsy originally carved out for itself. Amazon, Jet, Ebay, and Alibaba all are terrible for showing craftwork rather than a mass produced consumer piece with significant stock. If amazon had an etsy clone that improved on it at all, I would totally split my patronage, but there’s realistically no competitor online. 3. You can actually buy locally and keep your money mostly local. Places like amazon make this extremely difficult to figure out and prioritize. 4. Many etsy shop owners use etsy as a shop front, not as a sales driver. Assuming the main point of etsy is to buy a great product directly from the buyer will probably lead to shitty experiences. This is much more like a flea market, complete with regret purchases. It is not a convenient online shop for avoiding regret. Am I asking you to excuse etsy’s issues? Hell no. But you’re also not addressing massive parts about how the site functions for both its sellers and consumers.
- jzl 9y ago
  Everything you just said is exactly what I used to love about Etsy. And I'm sure that there is still some amount of love to be had for it, for those reasons. But finding the kinds of items you just described is exactly the problem. Sure, if there is something really specific I want, I would consider checking Etsy first and if I found a locally crafted item, I'd be a happy camper. But I used to love browsing it, and the browsing experience is ruined or at least heavily degraded (depending on the category) thanks to all the mass produced items.
SolaceQuantum 9y ago
It still works depending on what kind of item you’re looking for. Specific tea blends, cold process soaps, incense dipped to order, and specific kinda of pottery have all been successful in my getting handmade stuff I want. What kind of stuff are you looking for?
- jzl 9y ago
  I was gift shopping, and was just browsing topic by topic. In the past I had done so and stumbled across all sorts of amazing handmade items without much digging at all. Look at the landing page for "Home & Living" and you'll see what I mean: https://www.etsy.com/c/home-and-living?ref=catnav-891 https://www.etsy.com/c/home-and-living?ref=catnav-891 I could see how some specific topics might still have more handmade items than not.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    To my eye, most of the items on that page look pretty mass-produced or mass-produced + a personalization step. There's nothing wrong with that. I sometimes buy mass-produced "craftwork." Just because a wind chime (or whatever) is produced in a factory at some scale doesn't suddenly make it ugly. And it's not like the average thing being sold at a genuine craft fair is attractive. That said, I have too much stuff and I just tend to be uninterested in buying more even if there's nothing wrong per se with individual pieces.
jasonlotito 9y ago
Yeah, this is a real problem. My wife sells via Etsy (leather handbags, all handmade), and this is something we've seen happen. But it's disheartening to hear from potential customers that they won't shop on the site because of this reputation. Unfortunately, this is not new, and not the first time this has been discussed. This has been going on for years now. And frankly, Etsy is still the best place for this sort of thing. So my wife sticks to marketing and directing people directly to her Etsy store. Just a question: would you not buy something via Etsy (as in, found something you liked some other method but had to buy it through Etsy), or just not shop using Etsy?
- jzl 9y ago
  I would definitely buy there if I found myself there directly from an artist/crafter, like if I first saw something in person at a fair. I have nothing against the site. But most mass produced items I would rather just get from Amazon or go to a brick and mortar to see in person, if possible. When I said "I have no intention of shopping there again," I guess I really meant "I have no intent to go browsing for items there again, like I used to."

dailyvijeos 9y ago

I wish eBay, AliBaba or Amazon would buy Etsy and integrate the site well while keeping management and the right amount of operations independent. Etsy is, right now, a dingy in the storm of a double-ended marketplace without the reach of the 800 million pound cargo-ship empire gorilla. Otherwise, a smaller platform will likely buy it for an “undisclosed sum” and kill it, or investors will throw in the towel. Maybe that’s what he’s doing: reducing liabilities (ie salaries) and making revenue look good to spark M&A interest, while also considering survivability without an exit.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
spraak 9y ago
> Otherwise, a smaller platform will likely buy it for an “undisclosed sum” and kill it It seems much more likely that eBay, AliBaba or Amazon would kill it if one of them bought it.
jasonlotito 9y ago
Amazon already does something like this for Handmade items. It's not exactly great. I know, because they reached out to my wife to get her to move stuff from Etsy to Amazon.

hn_throwaway_99 9y ago

The change in culture was written in from the moment they took VC funding. The only thing that matters in capitalist markets is shareholder returns, and anyone who takes outside funding should understand that. For all the talk of "doing good" and maintaining a strong corporate culture, if those things aren't contributing to the bottom line, they'll be axed.

Domenic_S 9y ago
Seems like just a mismatch in organization type. A capital-B Business cares deeply about the bottom line. An organization that primarily wants to "do good" and so forth is perhaps a non-profit or charity. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being a non-profit or a charity, but that's certainly not what Etsy is. I get the tension between impacting the world for the better and keeping an ever-increasing number of lights on. It is an interesting tension.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  My point is that if you are a capital-B business, but you also have majority control and do not need additional funding, you can make tradeoffs against your bottom line if it fits your values. Outside funders may give lip service to it, but they don't care shit about your values, and honestly I think it would be better if all sides acknowledged this instead of pretending this wasn't the case.
- dorchadas 9y ago
  Honestly, that's the same kind of issue that Duolingo is running into. They're talking about offering the languages for free, but they're trying to run as a Business and make profit. Now it's led to a marked decrease in quality (which wasn't all that great to begin with) as they rush courses and throw in adds to compete with free competitors.
- ryanbrunner 9y ago
  I don't think a business is incompatible with the idea of "doing good" at all - Etsy's problem wasn't that it's impossible to "do good" as a business, it's that the founders no longer owned the company completely, and the new owners were more interested in profit than doing good. If they had been a bootstrapped marketplace that never took outside funding, they'd be perfectly capable of continuing to put their mission at the level or even before profits.

rectang 9y ago

The contrasting perspectives at the end of the article stand out (I'm sure that's the intent of the reporter): "There's only so much wiggle room as a public company," said Mr. Stinchcomb, the early employee. "If you really want to build a company that works for people and the planet, capitalism isn’t the solution." ... "To all the people who say taking Etsy public was a mistake, I say that's ridiculous," Mr. Wilson said. "There are some people who will say, 'Well, it’s not right for me. I like the old culture.' Well, I'm sorry about that. Going public was the best thing that ever happened to this company." Mr. Wilson, the investor, is unwilling to accept that there may be other value systems besides his own, and other definitions of "best".

heymijo 9y ago
I would not want Fred Wilson within 100 miles of the board of any company I cared about. There are many reasons Twitter is a mess as a public company today and Fred Wilson as a disastrous early board member is one of them. People learn from their mistakes, but apparently Fred has not. "I have heard from quite a few founders that they read the book Hatching Twitter and came away thinking that they would not want to work with me. That sucks for me but I don’t regret anything I did or said in the events that were described in that book." [0] [0] https://www.quora.com/What-does-Fred-Wilson-think-about-Hatching-Twitter https://www.quora.com/What-does-Fred-Wilson-think-about-Hatc...
mcfunley 9y ago
I'm as ambivalent about capitalism as the next person. But Etsy is a lousy counterexample to the premise of combining success in business and progressive values. Current and former employees conflating the two is disappointing. Etsy grew rapidly and organically for a decade, and never figured out how to grow intentionally in an ROI-positive way. As a private company it was not particularly concerned with revenue per employee, and headcount expanded like a gas to fill available revenue. After going public it was way too slow to realize that this wasn't going to fool the public market. I feel deranged pointing this out, but hiring triple the headcount you need to run your business is not a progressive social value. I don't know what it is. n.b. I worked for Etsy from 2007-2014. My own values force me to own this.

dboreham 9y ago

Curiously though, the long-term successful companies* seem to have found a balance between naked profit seeking and "good-ness", usually through either not being publicly traded at all, or by having a single very forceful leader e.g. In-n-out Burger, Costco, Starbucks, Apple. *Successful long term because ultimately seeking profit above all leads to reputational harm and resulting a downward spiral (or if lucky an oligopoly).

WalterBright 9y ago
> ultimately seeking profit above all leads to reputational harm and resulting a downward spiral (or if lucky an oligopoly) Not at all. If seeking profit leads to a downward spiral, then the managers are mistaken about how to seek profit. In particular, treating employees and customers well is an excellent strategy for making profits. For example, I asked a used car salesman acquaintance how to tell if a car dealership was reputable or not. He said it's easy - have they been in business more than 5 years? If they have, they are running on repeat business. Bad dealerships run out of suckers before 5 years.
- nitwit005 9y ago
  This sort of assumes that the suckers eventually realize they were suckered. I don't have that much confidence in people's ability to do that.
morgante 9y ago
All those companies still recognize that they are businesses. They just recognize that having a positive image and treating employees well can be good business.

doiwin 9y ago

I didn't even know Etsy is a public traded company. What are some other companies that are basically 'a website' that are publically traded?

astura 9y ago
Plenty Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, Yahoo/Flickr/Tumblr, Baidu, Twitter, Netflix, eBay, Alibaba/AliExpress, PayPal, Rakuten,The Priceline Group (Priceline, kayak, etc), etc.
nsp 9y ago
Facebook, Zillow(I think), Twitter, Shopify, eBay, to name a couple

junkscience2017 9y ago

SJW + Gordon Gecko = Etsy ? Why would anyone expect this Frankenstein's monster to survive? Something has to give. You are either running a safe inclusive space or you are trying to rake in money. If you want to do inclusion, start a university. Not that it matters much, with 84% institutional ownership, Etsy management will have no problem finding some George Soros type who will be willing to lose a lot of other people's money in order to keep the torch burning for the right (or more appropriately, left) kind of political theme

morgante 9y ago

This has been a long time coming. Etsy always struck me as a company which was fundamentally a small business. They were never going to be an e-commerce giant and should have focused on keeping headcount manageable from the start. Instead I think most of the Etsy leadership and employees forgot that they were running a business at all. That's fine when you're riding on the back of a great business model with solid fundamentals (see most big tech companies), but it fails when you're running a niche business with low margins even in the best case.

ordinaryperson 9y ago
Agreed. Their business model was to sell handmade arts & crafts, but scaling that requires mass production, which by definition is not handmade. A paradox and, IMHO, a low ceiling on where Etsy can go. It's hard not to sound like a handlebar mustache villain when criticizing Etsy's original business practices, but work is work, not a therapy group. If employees find corporate governance so horrible, hey, they're free to start companies that align with their values. But maybe they'll prove me wrong, who knows.
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greendestiny_re 9y ago

Why couldn't Etsy limit the number of seller slots on the website and sell them to the highest bidding persons? Both increases the quality and provides the funding.

eigenstuff 9y ago
I just opened an Etsy a week ago. I was so broke I had to borrow $1 from a friend to finish paying for my listings. (I am no longer that broke, thanks Etsy.) Pretty sure that's a fantastic way to keep out the actual artisans/starving artists/craftspeople and only allow in the kind of people who can gather up the cash to stock up on tons of Alibaba garbage.

ggg9990 9y ago

Etsy did things way too well. An online crafts market should not have a well-known engineering team and blog -- they should be running a patchwork of shitty technology that crashes every month because they only hired one guy to run the website and they hired one too cheap. They simply way overshot the MVP for no business value. Then they had to scale up the business into factory-made crap to pay for the hugely scalable platform they had built.

karlkatzke 9y ago

tl;dr: You can run a socially responsible, human, ethical company in the current climate in the US, but it is nearly impossible to run one with outside investors who are not invested strongly in the company’s mission or who are not willing to settle for organic growth.

mhroth 9y ago

Sadly, I feel that the real issue here is that few people are willing to pay the real cost of individually produced, handmade products, enough to pay the person making them a honest living. We've all become so accustomed to economies of scale that few understand the amount of work required to actually build any trivial artifact of modern society.

corvallis 9y ago

My friends and I used to frequent Etsy to find unique, handmade or independently made accessories and home goods. We haven't been customers for a few years now. The most obvious and notable reason is that the site is full of stuff that does not meet the above criteria. It mostly has garbage from China/Alibaba with mass-produced jewelry/accessories and trinkets purporting to be handmade, as long as you don't look too closely. What is the point of Etsy anymore? It's become a small, pathetic clone of Ebay, Amazon, etc. I hope someone can start another company like what Etsy used to be - a marketplace for indie designers and craftspeople to sell a small volume of unique goods to people who are interested in supporting them and their work. No need to go public or raise massive capital. It can function perfectly well with a small crew to run the site and a tight marketing/publicity team. It would be nice if companies were okay with staying small, private, and making a modest profit consistently instead of getting into the growth rat race.