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Comment by heymijo | Hacker News Reader

> when they failed to police non-handmade goods

They never failed at this. Moving beyond handmade goods was a deliberate move.

FTA

> But the growth — and yet another round of VC funding — put even more pressure on Etsy. Chief technology officer Chad Dickerson had taken over as CEO after Kalin was voted out by the board in July 2011, and in October 2013, in an infamous town hall meeting at Etsy HQ, he announced that the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so long as they designed everything themselves and were willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team.

Much of the community was aghast, fearing the change would ruin the culture of the site forever.

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> willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team

Either that rule has been dropped, or is simply not (adequately) enforced, in my limited experience of Etsy. Unless "I order it, it comes in a boat from China, I list it for sale" counts as a perfectly good explanation of a process.

There are still many "proper" makers on Etsy (I know people personally who use the site to sell artwork, corsets & other dressware, etc) that are genuinely hand-made, but they are often undercut by those selling similar but mass-produced alternatives (that are usually lower quality, but people often don't seem to care about that until after they receive the product, and they then judge all on Etsy by that standard).

The rule was placed so the community could swallow the pill. Once factory built products make it into the marketplace, it is a lot easier to gradually decrease rule enforcement over time, until you are effectively a niche alibaba, allowing factories to sell directly to consumers (they probably sold the board on that exact term)

> Moving beyond handmade goods was a deliberate move.

> the company would allow sellers to contract with outside manufacturers to help make their products, so long as they designed everything themselves and were willing to provide detailed explanations of their process to Etsy’s Marketplace Integrity team.

I think your interpretation is a wee bit wide of the mark. The spirit of being able to contract outside manufacturers to help make their products is somewhat different from a2tech's observation of sellers buying a bunch of cheap mass-produced crap and dumping it on Etsy.

There's a world of difference between a seller designing, for example, a nixie clock and outsourcing the PCB and perhaps some chassis/case fabrication, perhaps to China (based on your own design) and another seller dumping a bunch of imported cheap crap on the market.

I like cufflinks and wear them all winter. So I buy some, and I don't mean "one pair per decade". This comment is specific to cufflinks, or maybe it just uses cufflinks as an example?

There are a lot of artisans who make cufflinks based on parts they buy, but the item on sale is really the artisan's.

There are also a lot of cufflinks on sale that aren't really artisanal, just two parts glued together with no taste or imagination, and I have to wade through these while searching for the good ones. The share looks like 99%/1% sometimes.

But:

1. It's not reasonable to deny the artisans the use of that prefab building block, because many of the good ones are good for reasons that aren't related to the prefab block.

2. I can see that it's really difficult for Etsy to draw a line between the two types. Is it reasonable or unreasonable to sell 26×26 varieties of cufflinks with initials, for example?

I don't buy anything other than cufflinks, but it seems to me that the same problem may occur in other categories. Or not.

Perhaps the real problem is that the resold items with minimal artisanal work can be spammed. That these things can fill the listing, so that the artisanal work that is the core to Etsy's business model is in the fringes of its search results.

Something like https://m.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=cufflinks ?

Some of those look pretty nice.

That's the second category. One end is the same, the joining bar is the same, and the other end is decorated. Once you have a few pairs, you may come to grow tired of that sameness. Here's the more artisan pair I wore yesterday. Steel wire and four well-selected pebbles from a stream:

https://arnt.gulbrandsen.priv.no/tmp/cufflinks.jpg

> Perhaps the real problem is that the resold items with minimal artisanal work can be spammed.

I agree, this is kinda the point I was trying to make (probably very badly).

I like cufflinks as well so I appreciate your appreciation of them. Sadly I don't own any shirts :/

You might call that a failure of management.

My mental model for retailing is:

brand promise that appeals to consumer

communication of brand promise

delivery of brand promise

Stores that are thriving or surviving such as Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target, Dollar General, succeed at all three.

Stores that are going out of business at the mall are failing those.

Etsy delivered on those things when it was an exclusive hand-made marketplace. You could buy a magic wand that looked like it would work.

If they see themselves competing with Amazon they'll need to make a TV Network, a cloud computing service, ...

If they want me to go there instead of Amazon, however, it would be to get something I could not get on Amazon, like that magic wand.

Allowing outsourcing was the morally only correct thing to do. Otherwise the craftsmen would have been doomed to eternal servitude to their art. An artists signature on a work is not a guarantee the artist vouches for working on it only themselves. It's a guarantee the artists vouches for the quality of the product. So an artist signature is more of a form of branding than a signed proof of n units of work by person x.

Lots of great artists have outsourced the commoditiziable components of their work.

If you look at craft people, the ones who try to toil alone making articles that are not thousand euro a piece luxury items you wish they would know how to leverage outsourcing so they could focus on what makes their product unique and not just a batch of labour.

>Lots of great artists have outsourced the commoditiziable components of their work.

Not only that, there's a debate in the arts communities exactly about this since many artists employ hand labor to do the heavy or dirty work, specially those who make large sculptures or installations, still the vision is the artist's merit.

The last thing I bought from Etsy was a crewel embroidery kit. It wasn't handmade; the pattern was printed on the fabric commercially. But the person selling it was the designer b there's literally no one else in the world doing that.

There's a bit of a difference between that and something that looks like Amazon search results.

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