Etsy is small gone big. A crap-load of small businesses use Etsy’s platform to sell their wares. I love Etsy. I first went there several years ago when my extremely tech savvy husband told me about the site. I wasn’t impressed. It seemed like a giant craft sale, where all of the crafts were of the variety that my grandma used to make. No disrespect to grandma, she made nice stuff, but it wasn’t the type of thing I would shop for online. There wasn’t much in the way of edgy, cool or up-and-coming. As the site matured and more people added stores, the cool factor elevated significantly. Now if I’m looking for a purse, t-shirt, jewelry, furniture, art or most anything else, my first stop is Etsy. I can get lost on Etsy the way other people get lost on Facebook. I love me some serious Etsy. If you’ve never checked it out, go now and peruse. Even if you are a dude, there is something for you.

I love the stuff on Etsy and the feeling of Etsy. When you buy something from Etsy, you make a connection with a real person somewhere in the real world. You feel special because you get this special thing and the crafter feels special because someone chose their thing out of the millions of things available for sale. It’s a beautiful relationship. It adds something positive back into the world. So much of our society today isolates and alienates people, but Etsy brings people together. It makes a connection where none existed before and bridges a gap that had no reason to be bridged before. That might sound all high and mighty for a commerce website, but I find it to be true.

Okay, so here’s where the story gets a little less warm and fuzzy and a little more brown and muddy. It seems the business model that Etsy is built on doesn’t work so great for the individuals selling the stuff. It’s great for Etsy itself, they make money on each listing and a percent of sales, but for the small business it’s hard to eek out a living making everything by hand, charging basement-bottom prices (considering the time put into each item), and crossing your fingers hoping that someone will buy your stuff. People are used to paying for things that have been mass-produced and the cost of making things by hand is much greater. The industrial revolution didn’t happen without reason; we all want more stuff for fewer bucks.

The CEO of Etsy is a dreamer and artist at heart. He wants the small businesses on his site to bloom and grow and he’s even started a non-profit to try to help some of the Etsy sellers develop their businesses, but ultimately the thing that makes Etsy so great is the very thing that keeps its sellers from making a living. Handmade = more time = higher price to make a livable wage. The other thing that makes Etsy great is the mass volume of things to choose from. A great thing for Etsy itself and for the consumer, but a tough thing for each individual seller. That’s not to say that there aren’t people on Etsy making enough money to live on, and even some making a pretty penny, but the vast majority find themselves not able to get by on Etsy money alone. As a supplement to income or a hobby it’s a great vehicle to get your stuff out there and have your creative voice heard. But, as a small business generator, it seems the generator is broken. People are willing to pay more for hand-crafted things, but not that much more. So, you end up selling for less or you end up not selling much.

I think to make Etsy a full-time gig you need a few things going for you. First, what you make has to be interesting and cool or different, and second, it needs to be something that a person can’t get at Target, Macy’s or the local mall. It has to be the kind of thing that would garner a comment from a passerby. You need to find a niche market and rock it hard. I think then a person can charge more, collect a following, and make a living.

I’m rooting for Etsy and for all of the people schlepping things on the site. I guess maybe the focus needs to shift from “hey, you can make a living here”, to “hey, you can have a portal to sell your creative wares, but you aren’t going to make much doing it”.

My husband, the same tech savvy husband from the beginning of this post, sent me this article about Etsy a few days ago. The article was what got me thinking about Etsy and the whole idea of small. If you are interested, read it and then let me know what you think. Or, just let me know what you think!