My etsy photo checklist

We talk a lot in shop critiques about the need to use all five photos, which gets people asking the question about what to use those precious slots FOR. Well I can think of all kinds of ideas that need to be conveyed in your photos! Remember - if a customer was standing by your item in a store, they'd get to feel it in their hand, flip it over, open it - they can't do that online. You are trying to replace that. It's a serious challenge!

So with the help of our contestants from Bamboo day at Etsycontest, here is an easy checklist of things you need to show in your five photos.

1) The whole item in one shot, with white space around it so it fits in a thumbnail and I can see it without scrolling. This is ESPECIALLY important if it's a long necklace or a candlestick or something vertical - don't make me scroll to see the item, pull the camera back.

36th place June 16th, 2016
Theme Thursday! Bamboo items from $1-$50.
Vintage 40s Tie - 40s Necktie - 40s Cravat - Wide Satin Tie - Swing Tie - Novelty Print - Asian Tie - Bamboo - Red White Blue - Van Heusen
by royalstarvintage

2) Closeup of details

60th place June 16th, 2016
Theme Thursday! Bamboo items from $1-$50.
Fine Silver Bamboo Pendant
by MWTArtJewelryDesigns

3) "Sense of scale" photo - in its natural, usable setting, next to known objects, so I know how big it is. I have a whole blog post just about sense of scale photos - they're the most important, in many ways!

22nd place June 16th, 2016
Theme Thursday! Bamboo items from $1-$50.
Personalized Cutting Board, Grandma & Grandpa, Established Dates For Grandkids, Personalized Gift For Grandparents, Bamboo Cutting Board
by DolceHome

4) "Concrete scale" photo - next to a ruler that has both inches and centimeters to remove all doubt about dimensions.

5) Closeup of hardware. Jewelry, for instance, how's it clasp? Framed picture - how does it hang up?

14th place June 16th, 2016
Theme Thursday! Bamboo items from $1-$50.
Hanging Gardens of Babylon Adjustable Cat Collar
by FashionableFelines

6) Other angles. If I was in a store I'd pick this thing up and look at the back, side, bottom - I can't do that online, so give me a photo!

27th place June 16th, 2016
Theme Thursday! Bamboo items from $1-$50.
FREE POST - Antique Pair of French Silver Plated Cutlery Rests, Knife Rests, Stylish Pair, Superb Table Decor, Fine Dining, Bamboo Effect
by AToasttothePast

7) Photo of the item being worn, if it's an accessory. What kind of things does it go with?

1st place June 16th, 2016
Theme Thursday! Bamboo items from $1-$50.
Bamboo & Organic Cotton Extra Wide Headband, Bohemian Tie-Dye Featuring Blue and Purple, Wide Dreadlock Headband
by PoseyAndChelle

8) Packaging, if gift packaging comes along with it and it's cute.

Featured June 16th, 2016
Theme Thursday! Bamboo items from $1-$50.
SET OF 5| Drool Cloth|+Gift Set+|12x12in|Burp Cloth|Bamboo Baby Cloth|Organic Wipe Cloth|Non-Toxic|Made in USA| Rosie's Idea
by Rosiesidea

So that's 8 photos and you only have 5 spots - surely that justifies using them all! It's true, sometimes I get lazy and don't use all five, but if I'm serious about a listing? 5 it is!

My Visit to Etsy

Last week I visiting New York when I get this tweet from @ansate asking if I'd want to swing by the Etsy offices in Brooklyn for a visit. My response was "seriously?!" Well, seriously! I guess she'd been following me because we're both women in tech and cool like that, happened to be in town instead of remoting in from portland, and wanted to learn to give official Etsy tours anyway and this was a great opportunity. I was thrilled!

The thing is, I spent a LOT of time on Etsy because I run a shop (spacefem.etsy.com) that pulls me into shipping 2-3 bags of fabric around the world every day, and I'm in way too many Etsy Teams, and I dink with the API all the time... so the idea of visiting in person almost threw me, I was like "Am I in trouble? Too weird? Will I be able to act normal?"

Well I totally acted normal, it went great! And I learned some things by visiting the office and seeing a cool trendy tech company at work. There are some similarities between Etsy and any workplace, I certainly saw things that are the same as where I work. There are totally unique things too.

I should mention here that I am a "glass half full" seller. Most of my interactions with other sellers is in the Etsy teams and forums, where everyone constantly acts like THE SKY IS FALLING if Etsy chooses to move a link five pixels to the left... so I on purpose did not tell my Etsy friends that I was visiting Etsy. I felt a little awful about that. But I was afraid they'd just be on me to complain and that was not my goal, I guess because as a person who runs websites I know that things have to change but users always hate change. I wasn't going to ask for the "complain-in-person" department.

On to the trip!



Etsy's offices are very open, just big tables and everyone has lots of desk space decorated with nifty things... in fact they all have a small budget to decorate their personal desks with things from Etsy shops!



There's art everywhere. It feels like you're IN Etsy. Well, except I don't think I saw so many bubble necklaces. But the knitted mug cozies you guys... they're everywhere.

Oh and you know how if you hit a bad page on Etsy you get to this funny "A stitch has gone awry!" page and there's a picture of someone knitting a 3-armed sweater? There's a real 3-armed sweater hanging up. It just adds to the feel that you are in Etsy.

Photo by @jeffrigram

For an open workspace though it's pretty quiet, there are no desk phones and people are encouraged to go elsewhere if they need to talk on the phone, there are cute little closet-sized "phone booth" workspaces. I love it... in fact I'm going to steal this idea for my team and encourage them to drift elsewhere for phone conversations, for sure.

CEO Chad Dickerson has a nice office right smack in the middle of the floor with multiple breaks in the partitions around it. No corner window office. Employees can see the windows, the CEO sees people!

We were there at 10 am and there were a lot of empty desks. It was "early". Lots of people arriving too... I asked about that, and apparently a company's start time is a complicated formula involving of local, corporate, and industry culture, and maybe even time zones. Startups tend to start later, people wake up, chill out, check their email from home, drift in and work until 7 or 8pm. Where I work there are employees asking "Can I come to work at 6am every day so I can punch out at 2:30?" and as an upper manager now, it would look terrible if I came in at 8:05.



My tour was given by a data person so the other "data person" groups were pointed out and there are LOTS of people there whose job it is to gather and interpret data. This is one place where a website company is very different from where I work at the airplane company. We can't move the wings back three feet on all our customers' airplanes at once to see if it changes fleet utilization instantly. That number is what it is. So I asked Melissa who the "experimenters" were who changed things, and she said "Everyone is an experimenter!" with the goal being to change the numbers for the better, and that most important piece of data seems to be how many visitors end up making a purchase. It's HUGE.

I am kinda wondering if they look at diversity of business... how many different shop owners they can get sales for. Maybe I'll send her a follow up question.

I saw the integrity team, which was a sizable flurry taking up several tables, trying to win the whack-a-mole game challenge of keeping people from selling totally non-handmade factory crap. This is a place where a lot of Etsy sellers feel like Etsy doesn't do enough, it'd be interesting to sit there in the flurry for a week, it's a science drawing that fine line and they obviously have a big team dedicated to it. Etsy is not a huge company, only 600 employees or so. Just the engineering department where I work is twice that size. So the numbers of busy people in market integrity were noticeable.

There does not appear to be a busy hive of forum readers responding to every concern that comes up in a thread, sorry friends. There was one forum person pointed out during my visit, and it was not someone I recognized. But I relate to this, because at my company we have dedicated "customer facing" types handling the communication, and us engineers are separated from all that by entire buildings, and while some of the customer feedback gets to it, not all of it does. In six sigma class we watched a clip of The Simpsons where Homer gets to design a car however he wants, and it's a disaster, to illustrate what happens when you get too much "voice of the customer" and not enough looking at data to see what actually works.

Etsy is a B Corporation, meaning that they incorporate social and environmental responsibility into the things they do, and we saw lots of examples of that. Biking their compost out to the farm sorts of things. They have educational events, really try to reach out to the community, and I love their efforts to encourage women and girls in the community.

They let Cate and me use the photo booth where they take all those black background admin profile pics, ha ha!



Cate actually teaches organizational behavior at a local university so she had a lot more good questions than I did (or maybe she's just friendlier and less nerdy) - as we were leaving she said the tough thing is that everyone in her classes imagines they'll work at a cool trendy startup like the one we'd just seen. Sadly this is not the case. But even the big huge giant airplane maker I'm at has been doing some new things - shifting to open workspaces, creating mobile applications, encouraging personality. And I love our fun little side interest groups, that's the best part of working someplace gigantic.

On average I pay Etsy a little over $100 a month in listing, renewal and transaction fees... about 6-7% of my total revenue. The tour actually made me feel pretty darn good about that! I'm supporting a company that supports women in technology, the environment, their community. And without them I would not have this little side business I've got going on, because the items I sell really need that unique marketplace and brand association that Etsy has grown to be.

If you're a seller and in Brooklyn, you might consider contacting them a week or two in advance to see if their tour giving people will be around, they like having sellers in sometimes. There are no guarantees but if I got a tour, it could happen to you! It might give you some perspective and definitely made me appreciate everything going on behind the scenes, since I just went in wanting to learn and have a good time, and I did. It's a neat office and a really nice group of people, it'll be interesting to see where the future takes us all.

My geeky baby onesie designs finished up by clichemom - yay!

A while back I introduced a collection on spoonflower of geeky baby onesie kits - cut and sew designs so you could sew up a onesie inspired by your favorite sci-fi show. Of course then what happened? I got Etsy convos from people wanting me to sew them up and sell them. Great, except I've got a full time job and just had another baby... no time!

Then I remembered heck, I'm on etsy! There are shops all over the place run by people looking for more sales, talented artists who can totally sew. I searched around and found someone who was already making geeky baby items, with snaps even... for me that was the most pain-in-the-rear part of the baby onesies, I hate closures. But my new friend Katie at clichemom has no problem with them.

So I convo'ed her to ask if I could send inquiries her way, she said sure, and we're off... she's fulfilling orders and giving me design feedback, I'm back to being just a fabric designer. Collaboration is awesome!

Here's what originally drew me to approach her, these adorable suck pads... basically little pads that snap around your baby carrier (bjorn, ergo, whatever pricy thing you've invested in) so your kid can drool all over the straps and you've got an easy removable bit to throw in the washer:

Blue fancy tardis suck pads
by cichemom

And here are some of the onesies she's making with my fabric:

Little yellow trekkie
by cichemom

Little 10th time lord- 3-6 months size
by cichemom

Little Wizard 3-6 months onesie
by cichemom

Why would you split up your etsy shop?

I swear, every day there's a new thread in the etsy forums by a shop owner trying to decide whether to open a second shop. Ninety-nine times out of 100, I think it's an awful idea.

I mean, I just blogged about how the best way to promote your shop is to have more items for sale... when you split up your shop, you're diluting your efforts exponentially. Why do you think Target is so successful? Because people run in for a box of detergent, and right there in front is a fabulous new dress they never imagined needing today. But they buy it! That's what you're missing out on, the serendipity, the combining.

I've even seen people suggest that you post links to your other shop from the listings in your first one... what a mess. Those links should be around to show people around to things you think they might be interested in. If you start a second shop, you're basically assuming that they're not interested in your new product line. So what's the point?

And don't get me started on the etsy functionality headaches... customers at your second shop won't be able to see the feedback you've earned from your first one. When you post in teams, people can't see that you have multiple shops. Customers can't combine shipping on orders from multiple shops... that's a barrier that can DEFINITELY cost you sales.

I think people try to split off shops for all the wrong reasons... they want a new banner, or they want a different color scheme in their new products and don't want the backgrounds to clash. Puh-lease. 90% of your shop sales come from the search anyway, customers don't get to etsy through your shop unless they're your friends, and they care even less about your color scheme.

The whole point of etsy is that shoppers buy from people. There is only one you. Don't try to be a conglomerate, be yourself. Keep your shop as your shop and have it reflect all the dimensions of your wonderful personality. That's what people love about buying handmade.

My big list of etsy free shipping codes

This week I added a new feature to our big huge list of coupons so you can view just the etsy shops offering free shipping! It can be tough for shops to publicize sales like this but it can really save you some funds on the bigger items, and anymore with post office prices going up even little stuff like jewelry can end up at half price if you don't have to pay shipping!

Here are some shops I found from the new page:

Featured July 18th, 2012
Welcome Wednesday! The newest Etsy shops' items from $1-$50.
Silver Believe in Love Aqua Blue Chalcedony Crystal Bead Necklace Pendant Wire Wrap Handmade Jewelry
by LuvAlisa

Coupon code: FREESHIP1 Free shipping

Featured July 16th, 2012
July 16th! Items from $16-$16.99.
Desktop Organizer, Record Letter Holder, Upcycled Vinyl Desk Organizer, One Compartment
by HausofAriella

Coupon code: thankyou Free shipping

93rd place July 18th, 2012
Welcome Wednesday! The newest Etsy shops' items from $1-$50.
Fancy Schmancy - Baby's First Formal Wear 18 mo. Onesie
by PressedLEAFgoods

Coupon code: SHIP4FREE Free shipping

56th place July 16th, 2012
July 16th! Items from $16-$16.99.
CIJ Sale 25% Off Tie Dye Crocheted Fabric Headband
by yokieb

Coupon code: E52582 Free shipping

For a ton more, check out our coupon page: etsycontest.com/coupons.php

And speaking of coupons, we're now tweeting one coupon per day on the @etsycontest twitter so if you like sales, pay attention to that one too.

Why I'm not protesting Etsy over what "handmade" means

I guess now that I have my own etsy blog I can yammer on about ANY etsy topic I want, without caring about whether I'm talking too much about etsy. That's a nice feature, huh?

So I haven't weighed in yet on the handmade controversy but I wanted to say something because it's an issue I feel strongly enough. This week a lot of people complained that Etsy wasn't doing enough to make sure the items sold on etsy matched up what etsy claims to be ("Your place to buy and sell all things handmade, vintage, and supplies"). Regretsy, a site I love for other reasons, accused Etsy of putting a shop on the front page that doesn't actually make anything by hand but instead resells products made overseas by a wholesale company. Etsy investigated on their own, and said that the shop meets their terms of service.

The controversy I see is that NONE of us make everything by hand, and Etsy allows you to "get help" with the things you do... artists don't have to make their own prints to sell prints, a sewing type like me doesn't have to grow her own cotton and die her own fabric. I can buy fabric from wal-mart if I want, roll it in a big glue ball and call it my creation. It's handmade!

I have my own definition of handmade, and in the contest website I'm up front about it... I don't think digital downloads are handmade. I don't think a single store-bought charm looped through a string with a clasp is handmade. So in the contest, I reserve the right to remove those items... although I usually don't, because they usually don't win anyway. No harm done. And, well, I guess that's how I feel about everything on the internet. Maybe it's doesn't meet MY definition. Maybe it's not something I'd buy. But I am not the queen of the internet so who cares?

Etsy has been accused of not shutting down resellers fast enough, yet there are plenty of shops being shut down... just read Energy Shop's story of being accused of drop-shipping to get what I mean. And so when you say "Etsy isn't doing enough", be careful what you wish for. If Etsy's reseller radar becomes more sensitive, more shops will trip it. Then your shop might trip it. Is that what you want?

I always ask the same questions in politics too: there are people who are okay with starving kids if they can have a welfare system that no one could possibly freeload off of. That's impossible, guys. The only way to have a freeloader-proof system is to have no system at all.

When someone buys a bag from my shop they know what they're getting. They are NOT getting a bag made from hand-spun fibers sheared from my animals and woven in my basement. They ARE getting a bag that's my own design, modified from some tutorials and lessons from family of course. I buy the fabric at a store, cut the fabric into rectangles that I measure myself and sew them to commercially-available zippers using my sewing machine in my house. It fits my definition of handmade, and if someone buys from me it must fit their definition too.

There are also shoppers who'll buy a $3 necklace that looks a lot like one from a store. They can see that the etsy shop has 3000 sales and 500 items in stock. We can all call that shop out or report it or ask Etsy to take it down, but the bottom line is that those shoppers know what they're getting. They're not kidding themselves about it being handmade. Those are not my customers! So who cares?

In the debates and accusation, I've seen a lot of elitism... people calling themselves artisians above the rest. I've seen a lot of racism... as if no artists live overseas? I've seen a lot of classism... "I have a studio in my house so obviously I'm an artist, you people who do this to scrape by, who won't markup your wares to hundreds of dollars, should not be in my same marketplace". And really I think that's where a lot of this handmade debate is coming from. We all want to set the bar at ourselves, we all think Etsy should see why I am different and special.

Etsy is what it is, it's not magic, it doesn't exist to make you happy. And this week, amid all the craziness, they're sticking with their policies. That's good! I think we should follow the example and stick to our shops, and making them better, and keep finding the items that we're interested in. Let capitalism do the talking, and buy from the shops that you know sell handmade. I will not participate in any protest against Etsy because I don't like the roots of it, or what it's asking for. I do not want to make Etsy a police state. The frenzy needs to end.