Behind The Etsy Orange Brick Wall - Part 1

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

For the hardworking folks with Etsy shops, perhaps the hardest and most frustrating thing is the struggle to be noticed. With the hundreds of thousands of shops on Etsy, and the millions of individual items, it's hard to be a shop that stands out. Arguably the best way to drive business to an Etsy shop is to have one of your items appear on their home page (or "front page").

Now, Etsy is a business, just like all of the businesses housed within it. To drive people to a business they have to have a demographic and a marketing plan. They need to target a certain set of people (whoever they think is most likely to purchase) and pull them into their site. Etsy has to have an image, one that "sells" a specific lifestyle to it's clients. "Come in and buy X and become Y!"

Being on the outside of the Etsy inner sanctum as I am, I can only speculate on their specific marketing tactics. However, if you observe the Front Page you'll see a distinct trend. Airy, pastel, light, white, washed out, trendy items. It's what sells them, it's what drives the traffic in. It's working.

Etsy is changing, for better or worse they're planning changes to the way that the Front Page works, who's featured, and how. Will they feature shops that fall outside their current aesthetic? Who knows, but if they do, will it cause traffic to decline? Ultimately, will the one thing people are looking for, to have business increase, be the one thing that causes business to fall?

Either way, Etsy is missing out, and so are it's customers. There are loads of beautiful shops on Etsy with gorgeous items that just don't "fit" the Etsy aesthetic. Shops that you have never seen on Etsy's front page. Shops that have never been featured in their e-mails.

I'm going to take you to visit some of these shops. In this series, starting with my next post, once a week I'll feature a shop that has never been on the front page, that doesn't fit the aesthetic. Shops that nonetheless offer beautiful homemade and vintage items, but that maybe aren't pastel coloured.