How "Mature" is Etsy?

What kind of site is Etsy? What kind of site does it want to be?

It was built by artists, artisans, crafters, creatives, innovators, entrepreneurs, oddballs, and every loose end of society.

When Etsy was small, the melting pot of weird was run with a free but friendly hand. Some people complained the Admins were unprofessional and didn't do enough. Some thought the Admins were drunk with power, closing shops without cause and taking sellers' money.

Etsy got big. That's the point, right? Grow the business, find more customers, up! up! up!
They brought in business people and started running Etsy as a business because, after all, it is a business. Things grew and things changed. You may love your two bedroom apartment in the city and hate everything suburbia stands for, but once you start having kids, a second bathroom and a yard may be worth losing the produce market on the corner.

The United States was built by religious extremists who left England because they wanted to practice a stricter form of Christianity, creatives, innovators, entrepreneurs, oddballs, and every loose end of the rest of the world (plus the bit of humanity native to the continent that managed to survive all of that "creative innovation" and "entrepreneurship"). Hundreds of years later, we still see the ties to our puritanical roots. I don't know if the United States will ever shake that fundamental fundamentalist core. Is that a good thing? Bad thing? I don't like it, but it's hard to pass judgment.

Etsy used to allow "artistic nudes" to go without the mature tag. It stood by the stance that uncovered body parts legitimately can be used in art. Copyright law used to be a very touchy subject, too. Etsy was a place for free expression and avoided concrete rules limiting freedom.

Having a mature tag at all concedes that there are people who shouldn't or don't want to see certain images and that their needs are not only valid but outweigh the importance of a censorship-free environment.

Changing the entire site so that you have to "opt-in" to see "mature" tagged images says that acceptance and growth into fundamentalist America is more important than Etsy's fundamental foundation.

Admin Michelle (HeyMichelle) really hits on it in one of her forum posts.

what if I was looking at the site with my mother or grandmother or 11 year old niece? What if I were someone who avoids racy material and finds it inappropriate (a good number of buyers). Would I want to click on a link on the site and suddenly see a bunch of adult material and have to scramble around for a button? If it's a new user- might they leave and never come back?

But it's a choice between them and Etsy's pilgrims.
Reaching out to a wider audience can alienate your base. I hope the admins calculate carefully. I don't sell anything "mature," but I like Etsy as a niche market and I hope it knows how to stay that way, no matter how much it grows.

Art Credits:
Real MAGIC Hotdog Necklace by Nixcreations
Big Boy necklace by mentalembellisher
What I Cannot Say by Gwen Duda

productivity, pricing, and why my cousin is the awesomest person ever

My best, most marketable product as of right now is probably my business card-sized wallpaper envelopes. I make my wallpaper envelopes by creating a template on heavy cardstock, tracing it onto the back of the wallpaper sample, and cutting each one out by hand with scissors.

Terribly time consuming.

I'd tried using my Xacto or matknife directly with the template, but always ended up destroying the template and making terrible ugly shredded pieces of crap instead of my near-perfect little envelopes. I tried cutting with the scissors around the templates, but I couldn't hold them still propperly. The fastest thing that yielded up-to-my-standards results seemed to be the "trace a bazillion and then cut a bazillion while watching a movie or listening to This American Life podcasts" method, which was particularly annoying for the envelope shapes that I then had to go back in with Mr. Mattknife and make slits for the top to fold in.
I do these in orders of 50 at a time.

Because my process was so slow, it was never worth it to me to sell them for less than $1 a piece. Anything below that and I was in "screw it. I'm not making them anymore" territory.

This is going back to my whole Econ 101 shtick. Once I've made the envelopes, my costs are sunk and any money I get for them is better than having them sit there forever. But because generally make them to order, I can refuse to make more for any less than my time is worth (in this case, $1 an envelope). In theory the best price for me to charge would be some number that maximizes profit where supply meets demand, blah blah blah, but!!!! having to charge over $1 a piece means that if that magic theoretically shiny perfect pricing number is under $1, I can never reach pricing utopia. Oh the horror! The theoretical econ horror! And, more practically, the getting priced out of ever doing wholesale horror!

Enter my cousin and metal artist/blacksmith extraordinaire, Joshua Gilbert. He's pretty awesome and insanely talented and rescues mangy one-eyed evil cats he thinks are sweet and actually makes a living as an artist/metalworkerperson. In exchange for a bunch of the business card sized envelopes with "thank you for your patronage" cards (that's what he wanted), he made me metal templates in two sizes, plus metal folding templates (something I never even imagined) that make folding the envelopes up into nice right angles much quicker.

Quick crappy photo of the templates and current work in progress on my floor. You get the idea.

Now, I can take my Xacto and whip out a complete envelope, folding slit and all, in the time it used to take me just to pencil trace. Oh, brave new world!

I wonder about all those template cutting tools now, like the Fiskars Shapecutter, if they'd be even faster and better than me and my Xacto, or if they even work on negative image templates...If you know, please comment! Please please please!

Back to the econ question: will I lower my prices? No. Because people don't gasp in horror when I say they're $1 each. $1 seems about right. But wholesale orders and bulk orders? Finally. We can do business. 100 doesn't have to still be $100 to be worth making. So how much would you pay for 100 of them? 1000? A gazillion? Life is exciting.

goals

Photo: Greatest Goal II by scottwills on Flickr licensed under Creative Commons

My little brother decided he's going to come up with a better business model for me if possible. I know there are better options than my current slightly-more-than-half-assed Etsy selling and occasional live craft shows model. I should be going to salons and spas and boutiques and coffee shops and the locally owned card and paper stores around Chicago and selling there. I should be sending things out to the big craft/style bloggers (Dooce is #1 on my list).

I need to find a way to make my recycled wallpaper envelopes faster (if my cousin isn't going to make me metal templates soon, it's time to find a Plan B) so I can charge the best price for making the most money instead of having my annoying prohibitive bottom price where it's not worth my making them if I'm not charging more than at least $1+ a piece and can't really do huge bulk orders with any sort of speed.

Instead of all these things being vague "need tos" and "shoulds," I am officially declaring them goals for 2009. Hear that, self? GOALS. Set them up, knock them down, become awesome greeting card maven of the universe.