What We’ve Been Working on Behind-the-Scenes
May, 20 2022
Get ready for it: since the end of the Etsy Strike, a core group of volunteers has been creating a formal organization to help sellers The strike is over, and Etsy’s anemic response has inspired us to keep working on next steps. We're forming an "Indie Sellers Guild" that will fill the role a union would fill in a traditional workplace. In this post, we’ll talk about what [...]
Etsy’s Anemic Response to the Strike Inspired Us to Organize the Indie Sellers Guild
May, 17 2022
We organized a historic sellers strike in response to Etsy’s exploitative policies The Etsy Strike of April 11-18, 2022 was an important moment in the history of the handmade marketplace experiment. In just a couple weeks of organizing, nearly 30,000 sellers joined together and collectively put our shops on “vacation mode,” temporarily removing listings from [...]
5 Quick Ways to Grow and Leave Etsy
May, 07 2022
I have found that there are smart choices to better market your store and help move away from Etsy. For me, I couldn’t cut the income cold turkey. What I could do, was update how I was operating in order to make my products more appealing or easily accessible. Then, I would be better positioned to drive my own traffic. Here are tools and practices I’ve implemented that have [...]
Etsy Announces $40M CEO Bonus After #EtsyStrike
April, 28 2022
Crain’s New York Business reported just after the strike that Etsy CEO Josh Silverman was awarded more than $40 million in compensation in 2021, or 20 times more than the prior year. We all know that corporate pay packages have been getting obscenely fat, and the gap between executive and worker pay growing ever larger. But even mainstream business media like Yahoo! Finance [...]
Update on our Letter Writing Campaign
April, 21 2022
Howdy, Etsy sellers and supporters! Mattie and Valerie here with a quick update on the letter-writing campaign to communicate to Etsy the grievances we raised in our petition.On April 11, the first day of the strike, we sent an email to Etsy’s CEO, executive staff and members of the Board of Directors, inviting them to speak with us “in good faith about helping Etsy fulfill its [...]
Let’s Talk About What We Accomplished
April, 19 2022
The strike is over. Most of us are heading back to work now. Well, most of us were working during the strike too. Starting stores off of Etsy. Working on upping our social media game. For those of us on the outreach and core teams, media interviews became a full time job for a few days there! Today, we're back on Etsy, or about to head back soon, and it might feel like [...]