and fellow NYU graduates – Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik and Jared Tarbell – Kalin transformed his initial scribbles into a live website in just two months. Etsy was born. In just three years, Etsy has attracted 200,000 sellers, a million registered users and more than $27 million in funding.18
Etsy connects buyers with independent creators of all things handmade, the result being that you pay less and the seller makes more. In 150 countries, from Australia to England to South America, more than 3 million people are buying and selling everything from ‘myrtle wood electric guitars’ to ‘crocheted bath puffs’ to ‘bookcases handcrafted from canoes’. At the same time, through forums and live chats, as well as via offline crafts events and workshops known as Etsy labs, the Etsy community provides these artists not just with the platform but with the information and support they need to earn a living. ‘This human-to-human relationship of the person who’s making it with the person who’s buying it is at the core of what Etsy is,’ Kalin explained.19
Kalin posits that handmade ‘isn’t a fad, it’s a resurgence’, and indeed the growth and sales of Etsy have been phenomenal. In November 2008, when much of the consumer world was in a panic, Etsy had twelve record sales volume days in the month; $10.8 million of goods were sold – a 27 percent increase over October; and 135,165 new members joined the community. In the first six months of 2009, more than $70 million worth of goods were sold and more than 1 million new sellers and buyers joined.
Etsy is a throwback to the way consumerism used to be, individuals buying from individuals, and re-creating old forms of virtual market bazaars. It is a part – or you could say a pioneer – of the resurgence in the popularity of older craft industries – knitting, printmaking, crochet, ceramics, quilting, woodworking and so on. More and more people are looking to reconnect with the ties and variety of local and custom-made goods that got lost in mass production. Chain-store culture and shopping centre-fuelled conformity have created extraordinarily impersonal experiences with products that have no history, story or person behind them. In his book What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis observed, ‘Everything’s the same; nothing’s unique; and that takes the fun out of making, buying and owning. But the small-is-the-new-big world could bring variety back. The craftsman lives again on Etsy.’20
In 2009, Kalin travelled to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to talk to world leaders about Etsy’s vision to ‘create millions of local living economies that will create a sense of community in the economy again’. In a prepared video message made for the Forum, sitting on an old sofa covered in a pink and red quilt, and surrounded by patchwork cushions, a brightly coloured oversize toy octopus and two teddy bears (obviously all made by Etsy sellers), Kalin explained that ‘these millions of local living economies around the world are more sustainable for the planet than a small number of huge conglomerate companies.’ Kalin is a realist as well as an idealist. He admits that ‘there can’t be no mass production altogether’ but is equally ‘flabbergasted that anyone would shop at Wal-Mart to save twelve cents on a peach instead of supporting a local farmer’.21 These days it seems more and more people agree with him.
There are currently more than 5,750 local farmers’ markets in the United States, compared with 1,700 in 1994, making them the fastest-growing part of our food economy.22 To put that in perspective, there are more than a thousand more farmers’ markets in the United States than there are Wal-Marts – one out of every three of them started since 2000. There are now 550 farmers’ markets in the UK, compared to one in Bath in 1997. Significantly, 9 out of 10 people in the UK would shop at a farmers’ market if they had the choice. There is a newfound interest in being self-reliant and eating reasonably priced fresh produce that is not being carted all around the country and back again. Something deeper and more poignant is happening here. We are seeking to restore the missing link between producer and consumer. The experience of going into a supermarket to walk through aisle upon aisle stacked high with boxed, bagged or canned food is, for many consumers, starting to feel empty and even wrong. Sociologists studying shopping behaviour report that shoppers have ten times more conversations at farmers’ markets than at supermarkets.23 As it turns out, many of us would rather stroll around a farmers’ market and chat with the people who have grown our food and find out what’s tasty and in season.
The recent resurgence in the desire to ‘eat local’ was symbolically celebrated when a 1,100-square-foot patch of the manicured South Lawn of the Obama White House was dug up and turned into a vegetable garden for the first time since World War II. It would seem that the Obamas have inspired thousands to follow suit. In 2009, seed sales were up by 19 percent and the number of homes growing their own vegetables increased by a staggering 40 percent.24,25
Etsy and the local food movement are part of a mass re-evaluation of what and how we consume. They are also a part of a deep shift around three core values that lay the groundwork for a new consumer mind-set. The first is simplicity; consumers are yearning to go back to a time when markets meant community-based, traditional relationships with strong ties. When you purchase an item from Etsy or pick up a piece of homemade cheese from a farm stand, there is a history or story behind it. There’s a person behind it. The second is traceability and transparency – the notion that ‘local is good again’ and that consumers want to know whom they are buying from and learn more about the product than just its immediate purpose. As Michael Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, ‘Instead of looking at labels, the local food customer will look at the farm for himself, or look the farmer in the eye and ask him about how he grows his crops or treats his animals.’26 And the last is participation; people are increasingly seeking to be active participants more in control of their world – rather than passive ‘victims’ of hyper-consumption.
Today there is an unprecedented degree of interconnectivity as well as an infrastructure for participation. Our immersion in innovative information, communication and technology (ICT) platforms, specifically online social networks and handheld mobile devices, is the second phenomenon driving us towards a ‘we’ mind-set.
The ‘We’ Generation
Chris Hughes co-created one of the defining businesses of the past decade, Facebook. Unlike his partners and Harvard roommates, Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, Hughes was not interested in the software itself. Instead, he wanted to work out the ways that people would want to connect and share stuff with one another and how an online community could enrich the lives of its users – a passion that led to his nickname ‘the Empath’ among Facebook insiders. Hughes left Facebook in February 2007 just when it was taking off, with more than 10 million active users. His new calling was not another business start-up but to head the online organizing campaign for Barack Obama, who at the time was the underdog junior senator from Illinois. It was Obama’s belief in the collective power of citizens that drew Hughes away from Facebook. He admits, ‘I wouldn’t have left Facebook for any other person or at any other time.’27
The Obama campaign recruited Hughes because he knew perhaps better than anyone else how to use the Internet to coordinate and inspire supporters. Within a couple of months, Hughes led the launch of My.BarackObama.com (which became known as MyBO) and the Vote for Change sites. Hughes created a multitude of tools, such as the ‘MyBO Activity Tracker’. It gave people control of their campaign experience, but, also important, it turned the process of political canvassing into an interactive game, one with a serious prize – the presidential election. In this game, the users got 15 points for every event hosted, 15 points for every donation made to their personal fund-raising page, 3 points for every event attended and 3 points for a blog post. The site’s scoring system was weighted to give more points for offline activity than online activity. A single score was aggregated and posted on the user’s profile, and then scores were ranked to reward only the recent activities so that users would be encouraged to keep up participation. As Hughes puts it, ‘The more work you’ve done recently, the higher the number will be.’28 A system of work and reward creates a market-like mechanism and appeals to our self-interest. MyBO hit the
