Etsy was founded in 2005 as a small, idealistic online marketplace where individual creators sold their handmade products directly to consumers. Craft served as a form of social commentary: handmade stood for personal, local and meaningful. For many makers – strikingly often women – Etsy offered the opportunity to combine creative work with earning an income, caring for children or loved ones, and autonomy. The platform thus became closely associated with women’s empowerment, a DIY ethos and anti-capitalist resistance.
Today, Etsy is a publicly listed company. Its distinctive orange logo connects millions of sellers with tens of millions of buyers worldwide. Since the platform went public in 2015, the company has been under increasing pressure to grow and maximise profits. For instance, Etsy has repeatedly raised transaction fees for sellers, held onto revenue in reserves for longer, and cut hundreds of jobs – even in years of record turnover. Moderation and oversight have shifted to automated systems and AI. Thorough monitoring of supply chains is difficult to reconcile with a model focused on scalability and continuous growth.
In this context, the sales policy has also been relaxed. Sellers have recently been allowed to partially outsource their production to so-called production partners, provided that the “original designs come from the seller”.
Transparency regarding wages, working conditions or even the location of production is not mandatory. A product can therefore easily be sold as local craftsmanship whilst having been largely produced elsewhere, without buyers knowing where or under what conditions
