Etsy: A Lesson in Humility

I've heard this one plenty of times, and if you make stuff, you have, too: "Your stuff is soooo cool! You should sell it on Etsy!"

Ahh, Etsy. Home of crafters and vintage upsellers and upcyclers, all hoping to live the dream of getting rich by doing what they love.

It's a site so powerful that it launched the stellar careers of designers and crafters like...hmm, I don't actually have any names to finish that sentence.

But, Etsy was powerful enough to launch at least one wickedly satirical site, Regretsy, which has now, regretsfully, shut down, though its Facebook page lives on to mock the intersection of DIY and WTF.

I spent months deciding that I ready to open an Etsy store and commit my life to making, selling, and shipping. Why not, if it paid better than my sales on craigslist (follow the link to get my advice on using that site!) and I could finally stop hustling my friends and neighbors to buy things like

my absurdly awesome decoupaged boxes,

 1960s educational films reborn as bowls and vases,

music cassettes gutted and gussied up as business card holders,

or this renovated mid-century table that made a friend enthuse, "Mmmmm, reminds me of HAM."

So, I set up the store. (Please, do step in and look around.)

Nuttin'.

Yeah, yeah, I got "Favorited" often enough, especially from Chinese Etsy fans. I now suspect "Favorite" to indicate admiration for my work, plus a gentle heads-up that somewhere--maybe where the Asian Tiger roams free--my crafty ideas are about to be mass-produced on the cheap.

But once, ONCE, I made a sale. It was the Trapezoidal Vanity Seat.























I loved this chair, in large part because it comes with a great back story about another ambitious, kind-hearted, transplanted Californian, which you can read here.

I was tempted to keep it for the kids. I was goaded into selling it for a mere $40 at a miserable Christmas Craft Fair in Croton. No, no. I would not budge for less than $60.

By February 10, I got my $60 sale through Etsy! Plus $50 to cover shipping. I was gonna make bank.

Except that the chair had to go all the way to Petaluma, California. Ah, Irony: the chair came from California, and to California it would return...for $96 in shipping fees.

Math is not the Happy Badger's strength. No, I am not an accountant. But I do have a melodramatic streak, so I wept at the UPS store when I realized that after Etsy took its small handling cut, I would walk away with about $11.

Bless this young UPS worker: he didn't even charge me for the box or for proper packaging.
If he had, my $110 sale would have cost me a total of $130.

See what I mean when I say, "Craft--like crime--does not pay"?

I should have sold that chair for $40. I should have let my kids use it as a pommel horse.

The one good thing to come out of this humbling experience? My single 5-star review.

So, I've modified my expectations where Etsy is concerned: I'm looking forward to my second satisfied customer of Happy Badger Inc....hopefully sometime before 2015.


Copyright 2014, Tanya Monier