Etsy 101 - Part Two - History II

What Is Etsy?

Following in the grand tradition of craft fairs and flea markets worldwide, Etsy is essentially an online version of an arts and crafts supermall. Every seller on the site opens their own shop, naming it, running it, making, marketing, selling and shipping their wares. For the most part, everything on the site is supposed to either be handmade or vintage, or in some cases, modified sufficiently to create something handmade.

Launched in 2005, Etsy was named after the creator watched Fellini's 8 ½ and, searching for a vaguely nonsense word that would allow him to build the brand with no preconceived notions, noticed the phrase “Etsi” uttered often. In Italian, it means “Oh yes”.

Imagined as a marketplace that values hard work and handmade items, a place where quality over quantity reigns, the site struggled for the first few years, but slowly gained customers and shops. Along the way, they also modified things, staying on top of site improvements and keeping an eye on media trends like Twitter and Facebook.

Today, Etsy has over 22 million registered members and over 850,000 shop fronts. (Though that sounds gigantic, eBay has over 100 million active members) Most Etsy shoppes are considered a side business, a way to make a little extra cash or unload some “Vintage” clothing they found at a yard sale. According to Wikipedia, the bulk of sellers on Etsy are college educated women in their twenties and thirties and range from stay at home moms, to bakers, to artists and craftsmen as well as vintage sellers and fabricators.

Quickly becoming an offbeat and unique way to find a gift and support the independent business world, there is a lot to love about Etsy. Their search engine is quite efficient at finding what you are searching for and the range of products and prices is almost unmatched and they strive to be thorough when it comes to weeding out big businesses that are selling bulk quantities. That said, many people have managed to push the shops boundaries a bit and there are some out there that seem to be outside the realm of handmade products and goods.

Today there are over 18 million items on Etsy and 42 million unique visitors peruse the shops every month.

Peruse us HERE!

Etsy 101 - Part One - History Part One

PART ONE: History Part I - Deeply Dapper

 Back in the summer of 2010, I got a new car and decided it needed a unique sticker to go on it. I searched websites for far longer than logical and still couldn't find the exact thing that fit both me and my vehicle, a blood-orange colored Honda Element. 

Finally, I decided what I wanted - a Sasquatch sticker! Unfortunately, all of the ones I could find were either cheesy or more insulting than fun or drawn really poorly, so I decided to make one for myself. Grabbing a still of the famous Patterson footage, an exacto knife and a package of white clearance Con-tac paper (Yes the adhesive stuff you line drawers with) I created my own little sasquatch silhouette for the back of my rig. 

I think it turned out pretty great and once or twice I was stopped in traffic by people, asking where I'd gotten the decal.  At the same time, I had been making creatures in jars - Bottled Bugaboos - sculptures of non-existant creatures with aged scientific labels for cabinets of curiosity and I came up with an idea for another project, which I STILL haven't gotten around to making yet. 

All of this got my wife and I thinking about the idea of trying to sell them in a semi-official capacity. We had a shop on Etsy before, that had been unused for long enough that it'd gone inactive and we decided it would be the perfect way to try our hands at selling some of my geekery. 

I posted a thread on my favorite site on the internet, R3, The TRDL Forum, asking for advice and suggestions on a name, throwing out such winners as Cryptic Clips, Deeply Dapper and Arcane Accoutrements. Clearly, growing up a Marvel Comics Zombie had left me with an uncontrollable urge to name things with alliterations...

The forum responded, overwhelmingly preferring Deeply Dapper and on August 20th, 2010, just a couple of days before my birthday, I officially opened Deeply Dapper on Etsy.

I sold my first Sasquatch sticker about a week later and between then and the end of the year, I sold 13 stickers, each meticulously cut by hand from a cardstock template. Between those and one of my sculptures, I made $101.84. It wasn't much, but every time I slipped one of those little white guys into an envelope, I got a charge from the idea that someone, somewhere would be sporting a piece of my artwork. 

So we started thinking of ideas to expand the brand.....