My cousin Laura opened a virtual shop on Etsy in September 2005. With growing success, her Etsy business came to replace her other income sources.
One of my cousin's bags:
About a year ago, my mother told me that Laura had discovered that someone had copied her designs and opened a rival Etsy shop. A quick search of "hemp bag" on Etsy revealed that sure enough, a shop called EasternlyYours representing 3 young women in Thailand was selling very close replicas of my cousin's products.
About a year ago, my mother told me that Laura had discovered that someone had copied her designs and opened a rival Etsy shop. A quick search of "hemp bag" on Etsy revealed that sure enough, a shop called EasternlyYours representing 3 young women in Thailand was selling very close replicas of my cousin's products.
A bag made by EasternlyYours:
Etsy's main rule is that no new, mass-produced things can be sold on the site. This is a confusing rule though. Things that are not handmade, but rather "recycled" are allowed (meaning lots and lots of vintage clothing). But how does a re-sale differ from recycling? The skirt I bought at J.Crew last month isn't vintage, but if I were to decide I didn't want it and tried to sell it on Etsy, my account may be terminated. From Esty’s website: “We created Etsy to reconnect producer and consumer, and swing the pendulum back to a time when we bought our bread from the baker, food from the farmer, and shoes from the cobbler.” In employing an idea of regression in time as political agenda, Etsy situates its politics within its aesthetic. Politics = nostalgia = vintage clothing = politics.
A look into Etsy's inventory is telling.2* The highlights are that candles is its own category, that there is more jewelry for sale on Etsy than almost all other categories combined, and jewelry's closest rival (but lagging by almost 500,000 items) is the "Supplies" category which sells mainly jewelry making supplies.
Most of Etsy's political rhetoric centers on reuniting consumers with the producers of the things they buy. But who is being reunited with who? This logic of reunion depends on a purchase through Etsy replacing a transaction that would otherwise have happened with a corporation. Rather than buying a purse at a chain store, someone will buy one from my cousin. In actuality, Etsy's total embrace of a pop-punk/indie aesthetic (a component of Etsy marketing is the company logo screenprinted onto bandanas) positions it not as a substitute, but as an addition.
In a 2007 article for the New York Times, Rob Walker writes: “Kalin [the company founder] seems flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Walmart to save 12 cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer. Buying something from the person who made it is ‘the opposite of what Wal-Mart is right now: just the massively impersonal experience,’ he told me earlier. ‘When you get something from Etsy, there's this whole history behind it. There's a person there.’ I asked whether Wal-Mart was really the right comparison, given Etsy's eclectic, artistic merchandise, and the more workaday product mix of a big-box discounter. He brushed that aside, noting that Etsy sells clothes, which everyone needs."
Kalin is persistent in contrasting Etsy and Walmart. Etsy has next to no literature available on the site about the company's philosophy, yet a sundry of videos. Quoted from the site’s main introductory video: "Etsy was born out of the time I was spending in Upstate New York where I saw all these Walmarts. You go in and you're just shopping with this anonymous shelf of products and I wanted the marketplace itself to be community that I'd seen growing up and traveling around in Europe. And the idea that you could do it on the web and have it be this glocal community that's talking to eachother and buying and selling handmade goods."
In fact, Etsy practices a kind of covert "lobal" philosophy. Although it has a shop-local function, the site generally touts that it can connect you with wares are from all over the world. Etsy successfully conflates the quality of being handmade with its being local. Buying something from the person who made the thing herself induces a kind of general nostalgia of shopping experiences one has "seen growing up and traveling around Europe." Etsy operates by giving consumers the feeling of the local, while making possible the revenue of the global for both its crafters and founders.
Walker writes: "Some point out that for all the talk of consumers wanting to escape the mall-fueled conformity, Etsy's online mall format amplifies market driven trends. (Images of birds, especially owls, are inexplicably popular. (One crafter told me she was sick of making the same owl over and over again--but that's what her customers wanted.)” This crafter’s experience suggests that rather than replace Kalin's despised "anonymous shelf of products" with diverse handmade crafts, Etsy has worked to codify the DIY, handcrafted aesthetic into something like an anonymous shelf of its own. Recall the plethora of home accessories sold by Urban Outfitters in the early 2000's printed with sketchy outlines of owls, which had themselves been designed to look hand-drawn. Are Etsy crafters really making chain store forgeries?1
The site doesn't make many claims to supporting creativity and diversity, but the implication is strong. In differentiating its wares from mass-produced ones, Etsy depends on variety as evidence of its many individual producers. Etsy currently advertises over 250,000 sellers. This would seem to guarantee diversity in its products, and yet there are 150 knit hats designed to resemble cupcakes for sale on the site. A consumer's feeling of local is doubly false. Within Etsy, the quality of a thing being handmade connotes, and in so can replace, its being local and its being unique.
A selection of cupcake hats from Etsy:
How do my cousin and her Thai rival fit into Kalin's idea of a "glocal marketplace" and Etsy's homogenizing tendency? Etsy encourages its sellers to market themselves through frequent online activity: "Utilize the Internet to get the word out about your Etsy shop. Shop promotion can be easy when done on a blog or social networking site - these sites are made for you to talk about yourself! Like Andrea Salmon (Etsy shop SamAndrea) says, “Toot your own horn! Because if you don’t do it, no one else will either!”
My cousin and EasternlyYours toot different aspects of thier horns though.
This is my cousin's profile:
"I love all things natural :)
My goal is to create durable and long lasting items that are both functional and beautiful. I use natural, organic, sustainable and recycled fibers and fabrics. In my own life, I make every effort to reduce the toxic load and lighten my footstep on the earth. I am attracted to what appeals to my body as the life form that it is.
Nature is Life.
Life is natural.
Natural is beautiful."
My cousin has followed Etsy's advice and has a blog and Flickr account in which she seamlessly mixes shop info, production anecdotes, and personal news and observations. In sequence, her Flickr account shows a photo of the Oregon shoreline outside her house, a bowl of steamed quinoa, new fabric she got, a sliced grapefruit, and a new blouse she just finished. A customer who buys her bag can feel like they know her personally. They are buying an aquaintance, and one who is romantic, healthy, and natural.
This is a selection of EasternlyYours's profile:
"There is nothing more fun than going to the Jatujak Weekend Market (biggest weekend market in the country) together to look for nice lovely materials to create our masterpieces. We have bought a number of distictively beautiful fabrics locally made here in Thailand and in the region such as in India, Nepal, China, and Japan.
A lot of thoughts have been given to the design of each product with focus on functionality and Eastern beauty. Some background of the design or inspiration is included in each product’s description."
EaternlyYours does not link to any other sites, however the trio recently wrote an article for the official Etsy blog about celebrating Thai New Years. As introduced by Etsy: "With Thailand in the news right now, we turned to EasternlyYours an Etsy shop run by three Thai women. During this time of protest and unrest, the Thai are still celebrating their New Year holiday."
Piecing together identities for their Etsy shops, my cousin, a white American, focuses on small but palatable particularities. She likes textures, she shares her feelings about the weather, her eco-passion. EasternlyYours uses their Thai identity to attract consumers. They describe going to the local market to get fabrics with traditional Asian prints and their bags follow my cousin’s plans, but with Asian patterns and sometimes dangling Thai accessories.
In differentiating themselves to Western consumers, EasternlyYours does not exceed a pleasant exoticism, while my cousin, given her fundamental racial similarity and geographic closeness to her consumers (mostly wealthy white American women), is afforded personality, however market-driven her environmental concern may be.
So is there really a difference between choosing the indie owls, sparrows, and skulls, the natural-dyed hemp my cousin uses, and EasternlyYours’s Thai-patterned hemp?
My cousin and EasternlyYours together mimic the transfer of factory production from the West to the East and South. EaternlyYours not only makes similar bags, they sell them for cheaper. Diyscene.com has a fragment of a post about Etsy kicking off a seller who it found out was operating a sweatshop in Thailand and selling its sweatshop-produced goods through the site. If more Etsy shops open in countries with a lot of existing factory production, Etsy may be forced to refine its definition of “handmade” when confronted with the fact that a lot of the things on the “anonymous shelf of products” at Walmart were made by someone’s hands, albeit really far away from craft classes at company headquarters in Brooklyn.
Etsy's main rule is that no new, mass-produced things can be sold on the site. This is a confusing rule though. Things that are not handmade, but rather "recycled" are allowed (meaning lots and lots of vintage clothing). But how does a re-sale differ from recycling? The skirt I bought at J.Crew last month isn't vintage, but if I were to decide I didn't want it and tried to sell it on Etsy, my account may be terminated. From Esty’s website: “We created Etsy to reconnect producer and consumer, and swing the pendulum back to a time when we bought our bread from the baker, food from the farmer, and shoes from the cobbler.” In employing an idea of regression in time as political agenda, Etsy situates its politics within its aesthetic. Politics = nostalgia = vintage clothing = politics.
A look into Etsy's inventory is telling.2* The highlights are that candles is its own category, that there is more jewelry for sale on Etsy than almost all other categories combined, and jewelry's closest rival (but lagging by almost 500,000 items) is the "Supplies" category which sells mainly jewelry making supplies.
Most of Etsy's political rhetoric centers on reuniting consumers with the producers of the things they buy. But who is being reunited with who? This logic of reunion depends on a purchase through Etsy replacing a transaction that would otherwise have happened with a corporation. Rather than buying a purse at a chain store, someone will buy one from my cousin. In actuality, Etsy's total embrace of a pop-punk/indie aesthetic (a component of Etsy marketing is the company logo screenprinted onto bandanas) positions it not as a substitute, but as an addition.
In a 2007 article for the New York Times, Rob Walker writes: “Kalin [the company founder] seems flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Walmart to save 12 cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer. Buying something from the person who made it is ‘the opposite of what Wal-Mart is right now: just the massively impersonal experience,’ he told me earlier. ‘When you get something from Etsy, there's this whole history behind it. There's a person there.’ I asked whether Wal-Mart was really the right comparison, given Etsy's eclectic, artistic merchandise, and the more workaday product mix of a big-box discounter. He brushed that aside, noting that Etsy sells clothes, which everyone needs."
Kalin is persistent in contrasting Etsy and Walmart. Etsy has next to no literature available on the site about the company's philosophy, yet a sundry of videos. Quoted from the site’s main introductory video: "Etsy was born out of the time I was spending in Upstate New York where I saw all these Walmarts. You go in and you're just shopping with this anonymous shelf of products and I wanted the marketplace itself to be community that I'd seen growing up and traveling around in Europe. And the idea that you could do it on the web and have it be this glocal community that's talking to eachother and buying and selling handmade goods."
In fact, Etsy practices a kind of covert "lobal" philosophy. Although it has a shop-local function, the site generally touts that it can connect you with wares are from all over the world. Etsy successfully conflates the quality of being handmade with its being local. Buying something from the person who made the thing herself induces a kind of general nostalgia of shopping experiences one has "seen growing up and traveling around Europe." Etsy operates by giving consumers the feeling of the local, while making possible the revenue of the global for both its crafters and founders.
Walker writes: "Some point out that for all the talk of consumers wanting to escape the mall-fueled conformity, Etsy's online mall format amplifies market driven trends. (Images of birds, especially owls, are inexplicably popular. (One crafter told me she was sick of making the same owl over and over again--but that's what her customers wanted.)” This crafter’s experience suggests that rather than replace Kalin's despised "anonymous shelf of products" with diverse handmade crafts, Etsy has worked to codify the DIY, handcrafted aesthetic into something like an anonymous shelf of its own. Recall the plethora of home accessories sold by Urban Outfitters in the early 2000's printed with sketchy outlines of owls, which had themselves been designed to look hand-drawn. Are Etsy crafters really making chain store forgeries?1
The site doesn't make many claims to supporting creativity and diversity, but the implication is strong. In differentiating its wares from mass-produced ones, Etsy depends on variety as evidence of its many individual producers. Etsy currently advertises over 250,000 sellers. This would seem to guarantee diversity in its products, and yet there are 150 knit hats designed to resemble cupcakes for sale on the site. A consumer's feeling of local is doubly false. Within Etsy, the quality of a thing being handmade connotes, and in so can replace, its being local and its being unique.
A selection of cupcake hats from Etsy:
How do my cousin and her Thai rival fit into Kalin's idea of a "glocal marketplace" and Etsy's homogenizing tendency? Etsy encourages its sellers to market themselves through frequent online activity: "Utilize the Internet to get the word out about your Etsy shop. Shop promotion can be easy when done on a blog or social networking site - these sites are made for you to talk about yourself! Like Andrea Salmon (Etsy shop SamAndrea) says, “Toot your own horn! Because if you don’t do it, no one else will either!”
My cousin and EasternlyYours toot different aspects of thier horns though.
This is my cousin's profile:
"I love all things natural :)
My goal is to create durable and long lasting items that are both functional and beautiful. I use natural, organic, sustainable and recycled fibers and fabrics. In my own life, I make every effort to reduce the toxic load and lighten my footstep on the earth. I am attracted to what appeals to my body as the life form that it is.
Nature is Life.
Life is natural.
Natural is beautiful."
My cousin has followed Etsy's advice and has a blog and Flickr account in which she seamlessly mixes shop info, production anecdotes, and personal news and observations. In sequence, her Flickr account shows a photo of the Oregon shoreline outside her house, a bowl of steamed quinoa, new fabric she got, a sliced grapefruit, and a new blouse she just finished. A customer who buys her bag can feel like they know her personally. They are buying an aquaintance, and one who is romantic, healthy, and natural.
This is a selection of EasternlyYours's profile:
"There is nothing more fun than going to the Jatujak Weekend Market (biggest weekend market in the country) together to look for nice lovely materials to create our masterpieces. We have bought a number of distictively beautiful fabrics locally made here in Thailand and in the region such as in India, Nepal, China, and Japan.
A lot of thoughts have been given to the design of each product with focus on functionality and Eastern beauty. Some background of the design or inspiration is included in each product’s description."
EaternlyYours does not link to any other sites, however the trio recently wrote an article for the official Etsy blog about celebrating Thai New Years. As introduced by Etsy: "With Thailand in the news right now, we turned to EasternlyYours an Etsy shop run by three Thai women. During this time of protest and unrest, the Thai are still celebrating their New Year holiday."
Piecing together identities for their Etsy shops, my cousin, a white American, focuses on small but palatable particularities. She likes textures, she shares her feelings about the weather, her eco-passion. EasternlyYours uses their Thai identity to attract consumers. They describe going to the local market to get fabrics with traditional Asian prints and their bags follow my cousin’s plans, but with Asian patterns and sometimes dangling Thai accessories.
In differentiating themselves to Western consumers, EasternlyYours does not exceed a pleasant exoticism, while my cousin, given her fundamental racial similarity and geographic closeness to her consumers (mostly wealthy white American women), is afforded personality, however market-driven her environmental concern may be.
So is there really a difference between choosing the indie owls, sparrows, and skulls, the natural-dyed hemp my cousin uses, and EasternlyYours’s Thai-patterned hemp?
My cousin and EasternlyYours together mimic the transfer of factory production from the West to the East and South. EaternlyYours not only makes similar bags, they sell them for cheaper. Diyscene.com has a fragment of a post about Etsy kicking off a seller who it found out was operating a sweatshop in Thailand and selling its sweatshop-produced goods through the site. If more Etsy shops open in countries with a lot of existing factory production, Etsy may be forced to refine its definition of “handmade” when confronted with the fact that a lot of the things on the “anonymous shelf of products” at Walmart were made by someone’s hands, albeit really far away from craft classes at company headquarters in Brooklyn.
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