ETSY Newbie Guide

O.k. people. You’ve all heard of Ebay, I’m sure. But there is a beautiful new (well fairly new, it’s just a few years old) website called Etsy that is bringing the handmade craft show revolution to the web. 

 

 

Etsy is an online marketplace not unlike eBay that sells handcrafted goods and touts itself as ”Your place to buy and sell all things handmade.” ’one of the top sites online according to Alexa, Brooklyn-based Etsy boasts:

• 48 full-time employees, approximately 650,000 registered users, 60,000 of whom are individual artists selling more than 950,000 of their handmade creations.

Etsy is a creative experience. It’s a visual work of art. It’s so fun!!! You can search for items by categories, keywords, by color, by recently sold items in the fabulous Flash-based Time Machine, you can shop by sellers close to you with Shop Local, you can buy, or sell, join teams, or learn more by visiting the Virtual Labs (which is an awesome cyber-classroom, I even took a live streaming yoga session there :0), etc… There is a plethora of useful information for running a craft business. Etsy says it is around “to give all independent artists the technology and information they need to make a living, making things.”

Check out the Newbie Guide for some awesome help if you are a newbie like me! There’s still so much I want to learn about Etsy… It’s so inspiring to see so many artists and crafty women on there. And the handmade movement is such a giant leap forward. Etsy says, “Our intention is to offer viable alternatives to mass-produced objects in the world marketplace, and to encourage consumers to be aware of the social and environmental implications of their purchases.

The connection between producer and consumer has been lost. We created Etsy to help them reconnect, and swing the pendulum back to a time when we bought our bread from the baker, food from the grocer, and shoes from the cobbler.

Our vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice: Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade.“I took the Handmade Pledge this past Holiday Season, and I am really excited to be part of this great push towards buying DIY, handmade, handcrafted goods, which supports artists, and helps alot of really talented people do what they love. Here’s a quote from one of the artisans that took the pledge, “To buy handmade is to create, nuture and feed a community that, in turn grows in strength and then does the same in kind.” …

 

There’s something wonderfully fulfilling to make something by hand…to create something from nothing. It’s exhilarating to produce a tactile object from scratch. I love painting, photography, drawing, and silkscreening on fabrics & textiles, and I want to get into a few more crafts soon. Jewelry making & candle-making are some I wanna look into learning. Please check out Etsy.com & Buyhandmade.org to help spread the word about these fantastic websites. Oh, and be sure to stop by my very own little Etsy shop and have a look!! Maybe you’ll wanna buy something!