Etsy.com Peddles a False Feminist Fantasy

Everyone seems to love Etsy.com [2], the hip online destination for selling (and buying) handmade crafts. For individual artists, it enables them to expand beyond the local craft fair and network with other, like-minded sellers. For buyers, it’s an easy way to purchase beautiful, one-of-a-kind pieces. And for Etsy investors, who get a cut of every transaction, it’s a user-generated (read: low investment, potentially high revenue) business that still projects a green, anti-corporate image. There’s just one fly in the decoupage: There are virtually no male sellers on Etsy. If the site is such a great way for anyone to market handmade goods online, then why is it such a female ghetto?

After all, the site was founded by three men in Brooklyn, a haven for macho DIY-dom, and was never conceived as female-only. The home page has a minimal, modern look. The colors are not cutesy pink. “They’re orange and blue,” says Adam Brown, the site’s spokesman. “You can’t get more neutral than that.”

The crafts that sell best are not necessarily off-putting to men. Knitting is a relatively poor seller on Etsy, according to the site’s 2008 in-house survey. The number-one sales item is jewelry. While beading may be a predominantly female pursuit, stone cutting, metallurgy, and welding are not. Plenty of men design jewelry. They just don’t sell it on Etsy. The next two biggest selling categories are “Accessories,” which includes everything from scarves and money clips to belts and cufflinks, and “Art” (painting, mixed media, photography, sculpture). Men work in these mediums, too. Yet the proportion of male sellers on the site remains minuscule—just 4 percent. It’s a smaller percentage than men in nursing [3].

The site has tried to attract more men. It has a blog called “A Dude’s Perspective [4],” currently highlighting, among other things, gifts for Father’s Day. And whenever a male artist’s work is distinctive, “we try to spotlight it,” Brown says. But it hasn’t really worked. What’s the problem? “If I knew the answer to that, I’d be a genius,” Brown says.

I have a theory, and it begins with the demographics. The average age of an Etsy seller, according to the site’s 2008 survey, is 35—women’s prime childrearing years. Nearly 60 percent have college degrees, and 55 percent are married. The average household income is $62,000—well above the national mean. In other words, the Etsy.com seller is often a married woman with (or about to have) young children, with a higher-than-average household income, and a good education. These should, in sum, be highly employable women. So, what are they doing, often pursuing hobbies, or working only part-time, on Etsy?

I think for many women the site holds out the hope of successfully combining meaningful work with motherhood in a way that more high-powered careers in the law, business, or sciences seldom allow. In other words, what Etsy is really peddling isn’t only handicrafts, but also the feminist promise that you can have a family and create hip arts and crafts from home during flexible, reasonable hours while still having a respectable, fulfilling, and remunerative career. The problem is that on Etsy, as in much of life [5], the promise is a fantasy. There’s little evidence that most sellers on the site make much money. This, I suspect, explains the absence of men. They are immune to the allure of this fantasy. They have evaluated the site on purely economic terms and found it wanting.

On the site’s user forums, newbies are forever asking if it’s possible to create stand-alone careers on Etsy [6]. They get some encouragement but the answer from most veterans is no. “Technically ... yes,” krugsecologic [7] says, “but I’m a stay at home mom—so REALLY that’s my full-time job. So this is not my family’s only source of income ... thankfully:).” Indeed, many posters admit that their husbands are the main breadwinners, and their work on Etsy amounts to little more than a glorified hobby. (Less than a quarter of the site’s sellers describe themselves as full-time artisans.) Kymsart777 [8] is more blunt: “I would be on welfare! LOL … I wish!” And meringueshop [9] advises flatly: “very few people ... make a full time income from Etsy.” Yet the same thread gets started again and again. (“I'd love to be able to quit my day job and do this for a living” writes beachflowerdesigns [10], a mother from the Midwest. “I'm going to keep trying though!”) This is the dream that women express over and over on the site

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with women choosing to work part-time or for less than they could earn in other professions. But like those flyers you sometimes see tacked up on lampposts, or late-night television ads, Etsy actively fosters the delusion that any woman with pluck and ingenuity can earn a viable living without leaving her home. Etsy has a business model that’s akin to the lottery’s. It preys on the hopes and dreams of working moms and other women, while delivering genuine financial success to only the very, very few.

Indeed, Etsy has a regular feature: “Quit Your Day Job: 5 Tips from 50 Who’ve Done It (And Counting!) [11]” But this is 50 on a website with 250,000 sellers, and curiously, more than 10 percent are men—perhaps because Etsy goes out of its way to feature their work, or because even crafty men don’t pick up their kids from school quite as often.

Even the success stories don’t seem to be generating all that much income. Rikrak [12], one of the featured 50, boasts of having had more than 1,500 sales on Etsy since she opened her “store” in 2007. But her wares are mostly small-scale quilts: placemats, napkins, coasters, and the like. The last time I checked, her most expensive item was listed for $21. Many sell for as little as $4.50—meaning the available margins for profit are almost non-existent. Assuming, generously, that every one of these 1,500 sales was for $21, she’s earned just $31,500 in two years—or roughly $15,000 a year—and this is before time and materials and Etsy’s own cut. In her profile, Rikrak says she also sells to boutiques, and credits her presence on Etsy with helping to score some of these accounts. Still, it’s hard to see how, with margins this microscopic, anyone can generate much of a profit on the site.

If anything, Etsy exerts a downward pressure on prices. At the local craft fair, an artist could charge a premium for homemade goods, because the buyer had few options. But Etsy puts the artist in Brooklyn in direct competition with the artist in Dubuque, or London. This forces each one to offer ever more attractive deals. Most artists can’t drastically increase volume (the usual answer to slim margins), because the items are supposed to be one-of-a-kind, not mass-produced, in keeping with the site’s whole ethos.

As someone who’s handy with a paintbrush, I’ve admittedly harbored the fantasy of starting my own storefront on Etsy. I don’t expect to make a living, but I’m not immune to the siren call that brings many women to the site. After decades of being encouraged to forego the unpaid “women’s work” of our mothers and grandmothers, we are tired of being divorced from our hands and from the genuine pleasures such work can afford. This is the female version of Shop Class as Soulcraft [13], the recent book by Matthew Crawford, the philosopher-turned-mechanic. Women, too, hunger for concrete, manual labor that has an element of individual agency and pleasure beyond the abstract, purely cerebral work found in the cubicle or corner office. It’s become satisfying again to sew, cook, and garden.

But unlike our mothers and grandmothers, who were content to knit booties for relatives, younger women want to be recognized and compensated for their talents. Crawford has mastered specialized motorcycle repair not just because it makes him happy, but also because it’s work that’s embedded in a particular place and context, with a corresponding pay scale. People truck over their big heavy motorcycles, and he fixes them. This kind of exchange can’t be outsourced to China, or, very readily, to a different part of the country, or to a virtual community. This used to be true, of course, of your cool, artsy downstairs neighbor who hand-beaded funky necklaces. But thanks to Etsy, and despite its emphasis on social networking and shopping “local,” this same neighbor, who wants to work from home, has now been uprooted and asked to compete in a disembodied global marketplace that is everywhere—and nowhere—at once.

Do you do it yourself or just wish you did? Send questions and comments to diydoublex@gmail.com [14]. They may be quoted by name unless otherwise requested.

Photograph of woman sewing by Stockbyte/Getty Images.