High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our Ts&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email
[email protected] to buy additional rights. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1399557e-e48f-11dc-a495-0000779fd2ac.html#ixzz4Ayh3uDt8
“A store was out of the question. The start-up cost was too high and building a customer base would have been slow and expensive,” he says, speaking from Etsy’s headquarters in a sprawling Brooklyn loft space.
While the internet is full of great online shops, Mr Kalin says there are none that artisans and artists can call their own. “Ebay is a giant flea market and Amazon is a department store,” he quips.
So with $50,000 of seed money given to him by an angel investor (whom he met and befriended after bluffing his way into a job to build a living room), Mr Kalin set out to create a high-technology marketplace where individuals can sell handmade objects.
The timing was apt. Having helped redesign Getcrafty, an online community for craft hobbyists, Mr Kalin had seen a resurgence of interest in traditional crafts among young people. But rather than making the macramé coasters and granny-pattern toilet roll covers of yesteryear, the new generation of crafters were using traditional skills like knitting and pottery to create hip and edgy items that would not look out of place in a fashion magazine.
Meanwhile, the ascendancy of chain-store culture and global manufacturing left a growing number of consumers craving for something novel and unique.
“Etsy is about offering viable alternatives to mass-produced objects in the world marketplace,” says Mr Kalin, who designed the site while roping in his friends Chris Maguire and Haim Schoppik to do the programming. “It is about enabling people to make a living making things and reconnecting buyers with sellers.”
With Etsy, Mr Kalin is filling this void. But he hopes it will also create a wave of entrepreneurs, promote sustainable products and begin to change people’s consumption habits. “We live in a culture of excess,” he says. “We want more and then throw it away faster and faster. When you buy something from Etsy, there’s a story behind it ... there’s a person behind it. By getting people to value handmade goods, hopefully we can also get them to consume better but less.”
He has made an impressive start. In just under three years, Etsy has become the world’s biggest platform for selling and buying one-of-a-kind items, ranging from carefully tailored children’s clothes and old library books whose jackets have been reworked as journals, to original photographic and print artwork.
The site now boasts a membership of more than 650,000, attracted by a visually striking, quirky design and ease of use – for example, visitors can shop by colour by clicking on a Pantone-like dot, or by location, by clicking on a map.