What is Etsy? Helping you keep up with the cool kids.

If you get any cool blog alerts sent to you, or tend to trawl the web a bit (in a very non geek-I-have-a-life manner), you will no doubt have come across references to ‘Etsy’. And if you are genuinely cool and don’t surf, you should still pay attention because Etsy is actually really good. Not in a facebook/twitter/2.0 kind of way – in an oh my goodness, some of these things are beautiful, I must buy something immediately kind of way.

So Etsy is like a massive online shop, where people who make things can sell their wares. But we are not talking all painted light globes and pet rocks here (although I am sure they are there somewhere), there are actually high quality, beautiful and individual pieces of jewellery, craft, art and clothing, alongside vintage gear. According to Wikipedia (and what quality journalist wouldn’t quote Wikipedia?) it has been compared to “a crafty cross between Amazon and eBay”.  Don’t get me wrong – there is some utter sh*te , but there are also some fab pieces.

So – in order to sound truly hip and with it, feel free to drop the following conversational gems into dinner party chit-chat:

‘’Did you know Etsy is based out of the US, but has tens of thousands of sellers from over 150 countries?’’

‘’Did you know some of the Etsy stuff is really cheap and some of it is (rightly) priced quite high, according to the work involved? ’’

‘’There are some great tools to start using Etsy, including a gift finder, searching by category, hot items, editors picks and a ‘shop local’ option?’’

‘’Did you realise that most of the Etsy sellers are women? (Quelle surprise – not that I can’t imagine Captain Sensible whipping up a lovely felt mobile.) And Etsy has between US$10-13 million dollars worth of sales every MONTH. That’s a lot of Fimo earrings.’’

‘’I’m sure you know that there is some truly heinous and tacky stuff on Etsy. There are also some beautiful things that you won’t find anywhere else. And you get a warm fuzzy feeling from supporting small businesses.’’

And if you genuinely pop all those facts into conversation, don’t blame me if you end up talking to an empty wine bottle at the dinner party – because you just got REALLY boring.  

Click here for the Etsy website.

photo credit: jc.westbrook

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