Handmade 2.0
By ROB WALKER (AKA murketing )
Published: December 16, 2007
The declaration from something called the Handmade Consortium materialized on a Web site called
buyhandmade.org in late
October. “I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request
that others do the same for me,” it said, and you could type in your
name to “sign” on; within a few weeks, more than 6,500 people had done
so. “Buying handmade is better for people,” a statement on the site
read in part, and “better for the environment,” because mass production
is a “major cause” of global warming, among other things. There were links to an anti-sweatshop site and a Wal-Mart watchdog site.
The pledge echoed the idealistic language of a tree-hugger activist
group, but actually the consortium’s most prominent member was the
online shopping bazaar Etsy, a very much for-profit entity that bills
itself as “your place to buy & sell all things handmade.” Etsy does
not fulfill orders from an inventory; it’s a place where sellers set up
virtual storefronts, giving the site a cut of sales. While eBay rose to
prominence nearly a decade ago as an endless garage sale for the
auctioning of collectibles and bric-a-brac, Etsy is more of an online
craft fair, or art show, where the idea is that individuals can sell
things that they have made. How many such people can there be? At last
count, more than 70,000 — about 90 percent of whom were women — were
using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes, dishware,
stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane to the
highly idiosyncratic. Each seller has a profile page telling shoppers a
bit about themselves, and maybe offering a link to a blog or a MySpace page or a mailing list; most have devised some clever store or brand name for whatever they’re selling.
Maybe
you’re interested in a “random music generator” called the Orb of Sound
($80), built by an Australian tinkerer calling himself RareBeasts. Or a
whistle made out of a tin can and bottle caps ($12), by loranscruggs,
near Seattle. Or the “hand-painted antique ceramic doll-head planters”
sold under the name Clayflower22 by a retired schoolteacher near Las
Cruces, N.M. Or the “Kaleidoscope Pearberry Soapsicle” ($5), made by a
woman in Daytona Beach, Fla., who calls her shop Simply Soaps. Or a
porcelain bowl with an image of a skull on it, from a Chicago couple
who call themselves Circa Ceramics. Or an original painting from an
artist in Athens, Ga., who goes by the moniker the Black Apple.
Browsing
Etsy is both exhilarating and exhausting. There is enough here to mount
an astonishing museum exhibition. There is also plenty of junk. Most of
all there is a dizzying amount of stuff, and it is similarly
difficult to figure out how to characterize what it all represents: an
art movement, a craft phenomenon or shopping trend. Whatever this is,
it’s not something that Etsy created but rather something that it is
trying to make bigger, more visible and more accessible — partly by
mixing high-minded ideas about consumer responsibility with the
unsentimental notion of the profit motive.
On July 29, Etsy registered its one-millionth sale and is expecting to hit
two million items sold by mid-December. Shoppers spent $4.3 million buying
300,000 items from the site’s sellers in November alone — a 43 percent
increase over the previous month. Thus far in December, the site has had record-breaking
sales every day. Only about two years old, the company is not currently profitable
but is somewhat unusual among Internet-based start-ups of the so-called Web
2.0 era in having a model that does not depend on advertising revenue. It depends
on people buying things, in a manner that the founders position as a throwback
to the way consumption ought to be: individuals buying from other individuals. “Our
ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost,” the
Handmade Pledge site asserts. “Buying handmade helps us reconnect.” The
idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of
shopping is all about the past. [read on…]
[Image: The Crucifixion as seen via Google Earth; by The Glue Society].
[Image: Biblical scenes as seen via Google Earth; by The Glue Society].
