Attention, shoppers: There aren’t many places online where an actual person sells you something—let alone something they made themselves. Blame automation and mass production.
One big exception is Etsy, the global marketplace for handmade, vintage, and craft goods.
People want what it’s offering. CEO Josh Silverman tells me that since he took over in 2017, Etsy has grown from 2 million to 7 million sellers—and from 30 million to 90 million buyers.
Silverman casts it as an essential service. “There’s 7 million sellers who wake up every single day counting on Etsy to bring its A game,” says the former CEO of Skype and Shopping.com.
And all those buyers of jewelry, clothing, housewares, and other work by independent creators? They “need a choice in a world that is so much about commoditized commerce, about junk that’s going to arrive quick, be cheap, and end up in a landfill just as fast.”
That gives the platform a sense of purpose summed up by its brief mission statement: Keep commerce human.
“Behind every item you buy on Etsy is a real person with a real human touch,” Silverman says. “That is a differentiator for Etsy.” It also squares with a recent survey showing that two-thirds of consumers want more human interaction from companies online.
Silverman sees a broader pivot away from products and toward experiences, as people look for things that have more meaning in their lives.
In his view, Etsy caters to that desire by making human connections. After war broke out in Ukraine, Silverman and his wife started reordering flatware from sellers there. Other Etsy buyers have been stocking up on Ukrainian goods, too—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
“People feel really great about the fact that they’re able to support sellers that are in such need,” Silverman says, “and give hard currency to Ukraine at a time when they need it.”
Buying on Etsy is a huge act of trust, he admits: “We’re asking you to reach into your pocket and spend some of your precious, hard-earned money to buy a product you’ve never seen, from a seller you’ve never met—that probably hasn’t even been made until you bought it.”
While Etsy works to earn that trust by doing things like offering purchase protection, its sellers follow through by providing delightful experiences, Silverman says: “We build a brand that stands for trust, and we lend that brand to our sellers to allow them to compete and win when fighting against so many other mass-produced competitors.”
Etsy just took steps to clarify what it allows on the site—with new “creativity standards” that highlight the human element. In short, an item must be made, designed, handpicked, or sourced by its seller. Those details now appear on listing pages.
Sellers must also disclose if they created an item with AI, the use of which to churn out the kind of junk Silverman decries sparked a backlash against Etsy.
“Being very transparent about what role exactly did the seller play in this is, we think, important to building trust,” he says.
To drive home the message that it’s no Amazon or Shein, Etsy has also launched an ad campaign celebrating sellers. It kicks off every all-hands meeting with a seller story, Silverman says: “We always begin with a video of a seller showing us her life, her workspace, and what we mean for her.” For him, it’s about understanding Etsy’s responsibility to the people it serves.
“Making that very specific and very human is very helpful to our team,” Silverman says. “And by centering our team very much around that mission, I think they then do a better job communicating that to both our sellers and our buyers.”
I’ll buy that.
Nick Rockel
[email protected]
IN OTHER NEWS
Cash crunch
Does Bill Hwang have ice in his veins? The founder of collapsed hedge fund Archegos Capital Management just got convicted of securities and market manipulation fraud—for his role in a stock scheme that cost shareholders $100 billion. Hwang’s reaction to the jury’s verdict was to stare straight ahead while sipping water. Maybe he’s auditioning for a biopic.
Checking out
If you still use a checkbook, don’t bother bringing it to Target. As of mid-July, the discount retailer will no longer accept personal checks. Target attributes that change to the dwindling number of customers who still use them. Partly thanks to a rise in check fraud—sounds quaint, doesn’t it?—many people have abandoned the payment method for its digital rivals.
Real work
Zoom itself doesn’t trust Zoom to get the job done, so where does that leave the rest of us? Many employees of the videoconferencing provider have been ordered back to the office two days a week, chief people officer Matthew Saxon told Coins2Day. The rationale: Those hours are packed with “in-person” work such as training and all-hands meetings. Ironically, Saxon himself is fully remote, which should give his underlings a good laugh over after-work drinks.
High times
Anyone trusting that November’s presidential vote will tame inflation—which currently sits at 3.3%—should ditch the idea. So says Oxford Economics, which predicts that whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump wins, the only way is up. But given policy differences, peak inflation under Trump would be 0.6% higher than today, versus just 0.1% higher under Biden, the research firm forecasts. The key driver of that gap: Trump’s proposed tariffs.
TRUST EXERCISE
“Airport workers in Phoenix. A mail carrier and a fiber optic cable installer in California. This summer, workers across the country are staring down the barrel of on-the-job illness, injury, or death due to extreme heat. According to the National Weather Service, heat kills more people each year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes combined.
July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded, and we can already feel the above-average heat predicted this summer in the United States. Last month, more than 100 million people in 27 states found themselves under heat alerts. Even in my home state of Maine, known for its cold temperatures, some of our northernmost towns broke records for high temperatures in late June. This will only worsen as climate change accelerates.
Shockingly, there’s no federal standard that specifically protects workers in the United States from extreme heat.”
American workers should be able to trust that doing their job won’t leave them sick, injured, or dead. That isn’t the case when it comes to extreme heat, explains Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress.
Just five states guarantee workers access to rest, shade, and water, Rosenthal notes. However, the Biden administration recently proposed a federal heat standard for employers that would protect about 36 million people nationwide. Thankfully, the rulemaking process is moving faster than Washington’s standard glacial place—fitting for a time when real glaciers are melting. But for most workers feeling the heat, relief will have to wait at least one more summer.
