Etsy is starting to show how the maker movement can make money
Useful or beautiful?WILLIAM MORRIS, the father of the Arts and Crafts movement that briefly flowered in the late 19th century, would have approved of Etsy. The Brooklyn company is home to a thriving online marketplace for around 1m jewellers, candlemakers, bag designers, woodcutters and other artists and craftspeople from around the world. Among current bestsellers are combat boots from Italy ($367), a snow-goose necklace from Raleigh, North Carolina ($29), and a minimalist stainless-steel toilet-roll holder from Portland, Oregon ($36). For $4 you can buy a fridge magnet bearing Morris’s dictum: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
Morris championed artisanship as an alternative to the mass production of his day, which he believed promoted shoddy design and dehumanised labour. Etsy too is on a mission to “humanise” work and commerce, says Chad
Dickerson, its chief executive. As a business, it has just completed its best year since it was founded in 2005. In 2012 sales on Etsy totalled $895m; by October, before the busy holiday shopping season, they had already passed $1 billion for 2013. Although Etsy takes only a small fraction of that, charging 20 cents per item listed and 3.5% of every sale, it is said to be valued at more than $1 billion. There is speculation that it will sell shares to the public in 2014.
This has established Etsy as the leading business of the maker movement, the 21st-century heirs of Arts and Crafts. Morris’s followers were uncomfortable with modern technology, spending decades debating whether machines should play any part in production. Etsy and other maker firms have the same love of design and detail but, in contrast, have prospered by embracing technology wholeheartedly.
Etsy has borrowed from (the much larger) eBay the connection of small-scale sellers to millions of far-flung buyers, as well as reputation-building systems in which the two sides rate each other. It has added a social element that eBay has never mastered. It teaches Etsians, as sellers are known, about business, and facilitates online bulletin boards and offline meetings, especially in places, such as Brooklyn, San Francisco, London and Berlin, with high concentrations of Etsians.
More than a hobbyOther promising businesses serving makers include crowdfunding sites, such as Indiegogo and Kickstarter, and design sites, such as Quirky. Today’s artisans are also taking advantage of advances in 3D printing and computer-assisted design. In 2013 about 100,000 designs per month were uploaded to Shapeways, a 3D producer with a marketplace on which 13,500 designers have opened shops....MORE
