I’m leaving Etsy. Soon.
Eventually…
I hope.
Etsy was great for more than a decade, and along with other incredibly talented small business owners, I helped build the platform. Together, we made it THE place to go to get gorgeous unique items made or designed by real people.
At the end of 2017, Wallstreet took over Etsy. It’s all been downhill from there.
Every year there has been a new anti-creator platform change. Every year, we’ve been scrambling to adapt, to try to keep our creative businesses afloat in what feels like shifting sand.
On February 24th, 2022, Etsy simultaneously announced record corporate profits and a seller fee increase. It was the final straw.
I became the leader of the Etsy Strike movement on February 28th, 2022, when we were still just 140 people in a subreddit. By the end of the strike on April 18th, our online petition had 82,000 signatures, and we made international headlines.
It was a wild time! We made so much noise that we reached the original CEO and founder of Etsy, who tweeted out in support of us:
One day later, during a Wallstreet Journal interview, Etsy’s current CEO also had something to say:
I wrote the story out in a series of blog posts. It takes about an hour to read the whole thing from start to finish, which you can do via the following links.
We used the momentum from the strike to launch an organization to advocate for makers, artists, and other creative small business owners. It’s called the Indie Sellers Guild. Membership is completely free, and we’re open to creative small businesses of all kinds, and the amazing people who support us.
Being able to directly bargain with Etsy for change is still a long way off, but we’ve had some amazing wins since launching the guild.
While we were still working on the necessary paperwork to legally form the guild, we received news of the Etsy Strike Movement’s first victory – small but much-needed changes to Etsy’s Star Seller Program.
In July of 2023, our grassroots guild helped the Cool Online Act make it though the first hurdle past the US Senate Commerce Committee! The COOL Online Act is a bill designed to crack down on dishonest resellers – you know, the plethora of people selling mass-produced junk from China on Etsy by claiming it’s actually handmade by them. If this bill passes, Etsy could get in trouble for failing to enforce their own terms on dishonest resellers.
In April of 2024, we launched our flagship project, the Marketplace Accreditation Program. It turns out, there are quite a few alternatives to Etsy for makers and creators. There are locally-focused marketplaces, niche-centered marketplaces, and there are even a few projects that are more broad in scope like Goimagine.
7 marketplaces have signed up so far, and we interviewed each of them at our 2024 convention.