These are my personal views, and in no way approved, verified or validated by Etsy. My only association with Etsy is that I have a shop there.
For those of you running behind on your blog feeds, Maria Thomas is leaving Etsy and Rob Kalin is returning. Now that Thomas has made Etsy actually profitable (by a narrow margin, judging from her comments when she came to Minneapolis) they’re handing it back over to Kalin, who has been very quiet both as the person who stepped down and in whatever he’s been doing since his Etsy sabbatical. You can see more direct reactions in this thread, until it gets shut down – no one knows why they’re not using the admin forum for this. If the Admin forum goes away with Rob’s return, my rage will know no bounds.
Etsy was already pretty opaque by the time I got to it in 2006, and having met the staff – and also having met Maria Thomas in person – it’s pretty obvious to me that the entire company is running on personality. That’s a good thing when you’re starting out but it’s a bad thing when you’re going long-term, which is what’s happening with Etsy. Lots of staff member making lots of assumptions, and very few with genuine research and education to back it up – and coming from the last generation where college education made a damn bit of difference, I can tell you that the lack of curiosity/self-education going on among younger staffers is really disturbing and upsetting to me. New York is lovely, but it is in fact not the center of the universe – but from what I saw and continue to see from Etsy staffers, I don’t think they’ve figured that out yet.
I can imagine I’d be freaking out if I were an investor.
It seems backasswards to me to have Thomas get Etsy profitable (barely) and then to have her step down. “We’re making money, now let’s get in someone who wasn’t, buh-bye.” Um, what? I’m sure it’s more complicated than that – or phrased so it sounds more complicated than that. I’ve learned from many years past in corporate that ultimately, it’s always down to who likes you, not how much money you’re making. I suspect Thomas may have had to play mean-old-grownup a bit too often for anyone’s liking. But THAT is pure speculation.
I hope, truly, that they keep the structures in place that Maria set up – she’s being tossed before her very critical public would even have half a chance of seeing the results, and for a business like Etsy, results are slow because it’s online and we can’t physically see behind the scenes. Running well is about what doesn’t happen – we’ve had way less downtime, much fewer PR disasters (remember those brilliant remarks confusing the exact location and culture of Appalachia, easily corrected by looking at a Google map and by doing a bit of reading?) and it seems like some results are happening more or less on schedule. Also, Admin stickies – we had better keep them.
What this means to me as a seller
Frankly, I’m worried. Etsy hasn’t been great with serving sellers, their primary customers, and it barely protects them as is evidenced by the blogs that have cropped up pointing out resellers pretending they’re handmade. Some steps have been made to help – hiring Ian from Etsyhacks was a brilliant move – but I get the impression that all efforts are going into getting sellers to sell handmade, not in getting people to shop handmade. Combine this with the cheap-cheap-cheaping that has been picked up by national and international press advocating Etsy as a bargain site, and Etsy’s practices have undercut the very handmade livelihoods they claim it’s their goal to support.
So why am I there still?
Simple: It’s the devil I know. And I’m making what I can of it as far as my section of Etsy is allowed to be my personal domain.
But just in case, I do have a mailing list and Facebook fan page.
