Feature Friday: Etsy Pages

Comments (Archived):

1. nothing directly or indirectly to do with Etsy, but if you think you’re getting too old for your game try this for inspiration; https://www.youtube.com/wat…he’s 89 years old.

   1. That’s quite a feature!

   2. Fred Becky is awesome. Thanks!

   3. Actually it seems like a foolish risk to me at 89.People that age don’t heal the same way younger people do.This is one of these cases similar to where people cheer on others who risk their lives and call them “heroes”. It’s one of those non-rational “hey this is what people do it’s the right thing to do”.

      1. at 89 time is short. something gets you in the end. i admire his spirit.i came across a 75 year old lady doing the Tour de Mont Blanc. he now makes her look rather young.

      2. when time is short…

      3. that’s the type of passion i hope to have burning in my belly at 89. As for foolish risk, i disagree. he’s an expert (clearly) at rock climbing. He’s probably much safer on that rock than he is behind the wheel of a car (I’m curious if he still drives). It would be a “foolish risk” (in my opinion) for someone that hasn’t spent their entire life rock climbing to be doing this, but I don’t see this as any more foolish than say playing professional football at age 23.

         1. As for foolish risk, i disagree. he’s an expert (clearly) at rock climbing.Has nothing to do with that. It’s risky period. And as you get older your judgement and/or physical capabilities deteriorate quite a bit. I’m not talking about the chance of death I’m talking about the chance of an injury that requires him to be in the hospital and/or the healing process of an older person. Why do you think doctors don’t even want to operate on someone that old? Because it’s to risky unless a complete emergency. He’s probably much safer on that rock than he is behind the wheel of a car I don’t understand what that has to do with it? I’m not saying it’s safe for him to drive. It’s also safer than if he did many things. What does that have to do with the risk of the rock climbing? but I don’t see this as any more foolish than say playing professional football at age 23.Guess what? Professional and even high school football is risky at age 23. Talk to any of the people who played it when younger and are suffering from life long pain and injuries. Not everything is about death it’s about having some old injury that causes you to have to take medication or prevents you from doing everyday things. Brian Williams (NBC news anchor) played high school football and finally got fixed an injury that has given him pain I think he said “every single day”. He had multiple operations over the years.Bottom line: Many people make mistakes by underestimating the down side of some action they take. That’s always important. I fully understand the upside of him doing this obviously.

            1. 100% agree re: “many people make mistakes by underestimating the down side of some action they take.”I also agree that playing football is very dangerous, especially at the collegiate and professional levels. My point was exactly that. Thinking about it a bit more, playing college football is “foolish” with a capital F as the downside risk WAY outweighs the upside in my mind.The driving analogy was just used to show that there is a spectrum of risk in everything we do (and don’t do). For a lifetime climber I just don’t see the Foolish in it although I of course see the risk.

   4. I am wanting to live to 90 or ~120 — multiples of 30 seem like attractive lifecycle patterns for some reason.Not sure I’ll be rock climbing mountains at 90, though I’ll probably be doing fun things like handstand for periods of 24 hours or meditating for months straight.Something to look forward to.Or maybe I’ll be on a spaceship.So many future possible pats that will open up for everyone.

2. Brands curate their own stuff. I get that. Unaffiliated bloggers are compensated like an affiliate program?Not clear to me how this works.

   1. I think I get it. I might do more shopping online than you do Arnold! I set the bar pretty high in terms of shopping stamina.With all these sites there is too much merch- someone you respect needs to curate it and give their picks. Every retail site I spend time on has editor picks, sometimes a celebrity pick. Food 52 is just doing it – but well.I always found Etsy a bit cluttered and confusing so I think this is a good move.I was an early stuff picker on a site called Luvocracy which is now getting some attention. Eventually I found it too much work, but the concept was quite good. You put up the products you liked and why and they linked to the stores.. Polyvore has this nailed.

      1. Thanks…I’ll check out Polyvore.I’ve worked with fashion clients and implemented the mini-celeb curator thing with but few have found their pace.To me its a brand hierarchy thing. Is it a layering of the brand with Etsy, then brand, then celeb or for some, is the other way up?

         1. http://www.luvocracy.comCheck this out first…. Apple I know, I know the word one doesn’t utter much in here just voted it one of the 25 best shopping apps.

            1. Will do.You at the avc thing on Monday?

            2. Not invited….

            3. Think it was the Donors Choose thing but honestly don’t remember.

            4. I have heard that. It’s cool. I’just started chirping in this tree on any regular basis. And I was not around for the Donors Choice thing. All fair. Have fun!

            5. don’t think so.

            6. yep.

            7. you can have my invite. i’m not coming because when Americans visit my country they don’t need to have their fingerprints taken upon arrival…i did think about slipping over the Canadian border late at night.

            8. You are very kind – I don’t think they are transferable!I’m really cool – I never expected to be included.

            9. “I refuse to join any club that would have someone like me as a member” – Marx (Groucho)

            10. Part of being an entrepreneur is being able to get into places that have barriers or that you are excluded from and/or know how to game the system.Several years ago the American Psychiatric Convention [1] was in town and I thought it would be interesting to attend. But the cost was pretty steep (to sit and listen to the lectures). Might have been perhaps iirc between $700 and $1200 per person maybe even more.So I made up a letterhead with a logo that looked legit that said that I was the editor at “Adhd Treatment News” and put up a one page website. I submitted an application for press credentials and got two of them. Just like that. And was able to sit through any of the lectures. (I got the passes as a surprise for a doctor friend that wanted to attend but didn’t want to pay to go.)To anyone who frowns on things like this just remember the story of how Spielberg (depending on the version you believe) got his start in the business. Or David Geffen at the William Morris agency. Etc. Or don’t remember and think that life is fair and all of that and just follow the rules.[1] The convention is coming to NYC in May if anyone is interested by the way.

            11. Best story of fooling a big organization and getting into something you weren’t supposed to be at is Maguire University. Their motto “We Play Hurt” sports.espn.go.com/espn/pag…

            12. Actually that works. I’ve dropped in from Montreal with nothing more than a passport “exists” check.

            13. thanks. i’ll try it for the 20th anniversary gig

            14. Seems that having to book and pay for a flight and a hotel room in NYC is a much bigger deal than having your fingerprints taken. (For a party that is 2 hours).You know when I got my bar mitzvah suit fitted many years ago it was standard procedure for the sales guy to touch you “down there” and proclaim to mommy that “it fits well in the crouch”.

            15. backpacker hostels are more interesting.there’s that entrepreneur, he was a USM and his name escapes me, who doesn’t always use hotels. he claims to sleep outside at night to save money when on business trips.

            16. There was a time in the early 90’s when I had a job for +- 2 years working for a company in Silicon Valley. They had some policy that you had to share a room on travel. So I paid for my own room with my own money. Likewise getting something for free doesn’t mean you go for the free instead of using your own money. Most people have a really hard time with this type of thinking. I’m amazed at the number of people that will show up for a “free” meal that have plenty of money.I’m not one to buy into the myth of making money by saving money. And all that “frugal and saved every penny” shit. Like Sam Walton driving a cheap pickup truck to work every day, or Warren Buffet living in the same house that he started with many years ago.I take no issue with someone that has no money being willing to “sleep outside at night to save money on business trips”. But if that person was meeting with me and I found out that he could have afforded a hotel room (reasonably by whatever means I choose to conclude that after asking a few questions) I would have thought he didn’t have common sense in terms of managing money and I’d be worried about the implications of that type of behavior.

      2. What do you think about this statement then:”Right now, companies get by by pushing more and more stuff we don’t need. But with data and personalization, they might earn our loyalty and dollars by giving us exactly what we do.”http://www.fastcoexist.com/… (pertinent article to this post)I’m not sure I would agree, personally. If a site or a sales person knows your tastes, they will be more correct about recommendations, hence you would have a higher propensity of buying stuff, no?

         1. I think most people don’t always trust their own taste.Media and the retailers push things. I did a post on this this week.They often like to be pushed in directions. I know what I like. But I like to to be exposed to new things.There is so much out there now, and it’s often un curated for the individual taste.What you say about the sales person one went back to for years who knew your tasted is true, that is missing, so it needs to be replaced by something. The good thing about things you buy online in terms of clothes is they can be returned for full refund. So you can get a batch of stuff and try it on with all your own shoes and bags and then chose.The genius in this was Net-a- Porter. They all pale by comparison.

            1. +1 on “most people don’t always trust their own taste.Media and the retailers push things”….to word it more arrogantly … many are clueless 🙂

            2. Thanks. You seem to be quite tuned into buying all this online. I just heard a stat this morning that about 1/3 of e-commerce is on apparel.

      3. “sometimes a celebrity pick”I never understand why with something that deals with creativity and style it matters at all what a celebrity thinks of a product design wise.To me it’s almost as bad as when a celebrity starts to blow hard on political or social issues as if what they think matters more than any other person (talking outside their area of expertise and assuming they don’t have connections to some insight normals don’t have).

3. At last! An ideal solution to ensure the now massive inventory doesn’t override the personal feel of the user experience

4. & I’ll take this opportunity for a little self promo … http://etsy.me/1dsw2dF

   1. well played

5. Things to curate and curation: good match!

6. ♫♫♪♪♫♪♫These are a few of my favorite things…http://www.youtube.com/watc…

7. Like the feature. Etsy is hard to navigate and when I have shopped there I always think I am missing something. Will be interested to see if it increases sales.

   1. ” Etsy is hard to navigate”An artifact of lack of constraint on the amount of goods and services available. Same reason the yellow pages is good and local on the web still sucks. If there is no economic disincentive or friction there is no governor on the amount of choices and there ends up being to many things to choose from and a bad experience. The burden is shifted to the buyer from the seller. The seller doesn’t have to pay for showroom space so they just offer everything.When people used to shop at my dad’s booth at the giftshow the smart buyers, the buyers for the large chains and departments stores would say “just give me your best selling items and the ones you think will sell”. If my father choose wrong and didn’t give them “the best stuff” they would buy less the next year or not at all. So he had an incentive to think for them and they ended up with the products most likely to be bought in their stores. The system worked very well.Likewise my father was constantly pitched by vendors trying to get their nitch products into distribution. All these crafty people would send their stuff to him to try and get it included. Because there was a cost to include the “nth” product my father had to put much thought into what he would add and whether it would sell. The burden was on him, not the final buyer (you).

8. Marketplace represents a business model, not a customer experience. To customers, they’re just buying things as they do in any store. When we remember this, we remember that there are basic things customers like — curation, service, etc. — that cannot be forgotten, no matter if you’re a retail operation, marketplace, or whatever under the hood.Nice feature, Etsy.

   1. Agreed.That being said, I think Pinterest believes that it is Pinterest for buying stuff. 😉

      1. If Pinterest truly believes that, Pinterest is misguided. 🙂

         1. http://mashable.com/2013/09…

            1. I think Pinterest adding advertising means it considers itself a media channel, which it is. Eyeballs —> ad revenue.And they’re better off this way. They’ll make more money this way. And like Facebook before it, being able to tailor ads to the demographic/like details of the person looking at the page, Pinterest will be able to similarly hone in on rich data, pairing ads for milk on boards that feature cookies.That’s better than expecting to make affiliate pennies from people clicking on pins of clothes and then leaving the platform to buy the item on the retailer’s site. Svpply, Wanelo, Polyvore and The Fancy are all doing that already… and not exactly to the tune of a lot of money, either. At least not Facebook-scale revenue.

            2. I hear what you’re saying.I wouldn’t bet against them bringing commerce into the platform at some point.Hard to say if it will be successful. I don’t even use the product so I’m not really qualified to say. 🙂

            3. I certainly hope they’re smarter than that. Or develop some new way for a not-primarily-commerce channel to sell products without getting into the rat race for affiliate pennies. I have no clue what that magical undiscovered solution would be, but good on them if they discover it!BTW, I don’t use the product, either. But I’m getting into it now. Unfortunately for me, it comes with the territory of starting an e-comm business. :-/

            4. There are a few companies who haven’t understood the user experience and why people showed up to begin with, and then they start to alter that experience – meanwhile metrics still go up because of the waves behind them influencing things. It’s hard to get right, and I’m not sure most if anyone can individually keep track and re-organize everything into their specific contexts of use that should be maintained – which leads to use cases being mixed and UX being affected.

            5. Agreed! I think it will be very difficult for Pinterest to integrate commerce into its platform as many of its pins are pictures from blogs or unshoppable sites. Additionally, many of the pins redirect its users to other shopping sites (Etsy is actually 1 of 2 of the most popular sites pinned on Pinterest!). Pinterest will have to find a way to sell products without changing or limiting the photo-sharing/collage making experience for its users.

            6. It seems like an obvious revenue stream to quickly access though too. Doesn’t mean they’re not going to want people to be buying through Pinterest, however that won’t happen easily and not going to be easy to do very well.

      2. The pinterest ecosystem survives off of pins from external websites. Sometimes the click-through leads to another product or a non-commerce site. Etsy has the advantage of what you see is what you can purchase.

         1. Indeed, it’s containing within the ecosystem and having no traffic leaks.

      3. They want it to be, anyway. They’re acting like Facebook though and not facilitating what they best could. It’s going to ruin or at minimum lessen the user experience.

   2. You consider Amazon a marketplace or a catalog?Whichever you chose though (and I still want to know) it is most certainly a customer experience on the efficiency and customer service side.

      1. Is this a trick question? ;-)In terms of business model: Amazon, like Fab (which I mention a lot), is a lot of things!They’re both retailers in a lot of ways (probably most). They make items, buy items, store items, and ship items. But they’re both partially marketplaces, too, in that they act as middlemen for other sellers. I can go to Amazon or Fab right now and they’ll list a product I have to sell (Amazon through self-service on their site, Fab though contacting a human merchandiser and either getting approved or denied) and then I’m responsible for shipping it out to the customer.In terms of the shopper experience: Amazon is a search engine for products.People go to Amazon when they have a pretty good idea what they want. People don’t go to Amazon and browse “shirts.” People go to Amazon and **type in** “Polo Shirt.” That is an incredibly huge point of difference. That is the action of someone who has a pretty good idea of what they want. Yes, Amazon has some discovery features, but they are not core to the experience — the core is that search engine box that sits at the top of the site that you type specific things into.(You didn’t ask for the rest of this, but since I’m trying to get better at explaining this for my own good…)What Amazon doesn’t cover is people who **don’t** know what they want. People who want a shirt, are open to options, and want to **be shown** something — generally with an opinion or point of view, like a salesperson or a store’s aesthetic itself would provide (think Barney’s or Net-a-Porter).It’s not that this kind of shopping doesn’t happen on the web; it does, and its collective worth is still a bigger slice of the pie than the Amazon/eBay/Walmart/Soap.com/etc. search engine style shopping. But, boy is it inefficient for the shopper! And its inefficient because there aren’t many good large-scale aggregators — the kind of aggregation potential that a large-scale marketplace can provide. Today, if I want to browse, I have to go to multiple retailers who have aesthetics I like, and be forced to pick from their often-times limited inventory, and keep hopping from store to store until I find something. Like being in a mall. But the Internet isn’t a mall; it has technology on its side and it can do better.For marketplaces, there’s Etsy for crafts, and other niche marketplace aggregators, but they’re mostly peer to peer. They’re not B-to-C, so they miss the level of product quality and assortment you get when you go a notch up from peer to peer.Related to what I’m building, http://www.localsandvoyeurs.com is a (mostly) B2C marketplace. And that first “B” is small businesses, not large scale operations. We’re taking individual makers, too, but since we have minimum inventory access requirements (to make sure #1 we can scale massively, and #2 we don’t compete with Etsy), the individual makers are typically those who’ve “grown out of” Etsy and are now scaling their operations beyond hand made one-offs and can produce inventory en masse. And since small business represents 70% of our economy, we have the potential to be bigger than any big box retailer ever could. Not to mention funnel profits back into local communities instead of into the pockets of large distributors and their shareholders.I think that’s more than you asked for, but hopefully answers your question. It certainly helped me crystalize some of my points on the issue. 🙂

         1. Great response, I thank you!I wasn’t looking for an answer as much as picking your brain as I think about this a lot for myself and clients.On your first point, I simplify it– Amazon is a place you go to buy things. They don’t sell anything. We may use different words but we are agreeing I think on this as a core piece.I wrote this piece a long time ago for an investor who wanted to know why wine online except for DTC has failed. Although vertical in orientation it hits the selling/buying dichotomy head on and you might find some value: Wine needs to be sold, not bought http://awe.sm/q3TgzTwo other pieces:-Not sure I get where Etsy is P to P unless you mean that the connection you get between an artisan, like the connection you get to someone selling a Kickstarter project is more engaged than traditional or online retail.-Re: you’re project, what’s the brand hierarchy? If your merchants have scaled beyond Etsy they prob have a brand footprint. How does that play with the brand you are creating. How are you going to finesse this is something I’m sure you noodle over a lot.Bigger discussion I know.Thanks!

            1. Well, Fred would call Etsy P2P. He actually did so in his MBA Monday P2P Revenue Model post: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/201…On http://www.localsandvoyeurs.com, most of the vendors we’ve signed up so far have some sort of a brand that they’re trying to grow. A lot of them have websites, brick and mortar stores, and are selling via other distributors online and in the streets. We’ve got a vendor who just sold a huge holiday order to Williams Sonoma, and one who’s still on Etsy trying to figure out the next step — so the range of how far they’ve “made it” is all over the place. But they’re all in the same boat in that they’re all small business that simply want to get bigger.We very much want to tell their stories and help them make the next leap. Their story is our story. I don’t want people to come to us for curation, I want them to come to use because of the type of companies we represent. Promoting them promotes us.I could nerd out on this all day. 🙂

            2. Thanks for the link. I remember that post.I don’t think of it that way honestly but so be it.Re: yours…I’m signed up so I’ll have a better understanding of how this translates when you are live.The kicker of course will not be finding quality merchants (there are many actually) but building the market for them. That’s the value, always is actually. Customer acquisition is why they participate.Good luck with this,

            3. yes i would call it p2p. it is human to human commerce. you buy from a real person who is responsible for that item being in Etsy

9. An abundance of information creates a poverty of Attention. A curation hand helps.Another analogy for this are curated Amazon Book Lists.

   1. like Fox News

      1. is that a joke 🙂

         1. the hand that is curating is of keen interest to me. Fox News is a joke.

            1. Right.

            2. Fox News, so right, and so wrong.

   2. Very true. Too bad the very folks who support marketplaces tend to poo-poo curation. I can’t think of a platform that would need curation more than a marketplace-style open free-for-all of products.

   3. The word curate has been beaten to death these days. Curators work in museums. Everyone else is just selecting stuff. Can you imagine a restaurant serving an assortment of “curated” cheeses? Sounds silly.

      1. I like markets. Markets curate better than individuals.

         1. Communities do this by nature of themselves.

            1. We’ve “talked” about this somewhere, haven’t we — the market as community — or was it the other way around?

            2. I think I talk about this endlessly or so I’m told.From my most recent post ( http://arnoldwaldstein.com/… ).”The belief that the antidote to the signal/noise conundrum on the web is curation is temporary at best. The true answer to found value and the most natural direction for discovery is community. Flash community that is formed cross network, around each of us, at any time wherever we are.”

            3. Not sure that’s the right link.There is something delightful about shopping in one’s community. But the community has shifted location. No longer necessarily physical.(Don’t get me wrong — love exploring new markets too — but only when there is time and resource.)

            4. Link fixed–having a lot of problem with awesm links this week.Agree on all the rest though Donna.

            5. yep, no algorithm needed.

      2. Is editor a better word?

      3. Words can take on new or additional meaning, and seems curate has. Selection stuff doesn’t sound sexy, nor does building lists.

10. Curious…do they get a cut from sales on these pages?

    1. The answer I saw in an interview was NO in the US, but there are some affiliate relationships being worked on outside the US. Interesting that someone would get enough value curating just to build reputation . .and not get a cut > as opposed to traditional decorators that buy at a discount and sell to you, or simply sell with an upcharge.

    2. Marketing of their brand could be enough.

       1. that’s probably what it is. indirect benefit.

    3. i don’t think so

11. “That hasn’t hurt its growth, which has been amazing, but it has made the buying experience difficult.”Both can’t be true.Either esty has understood its customer (which constitutes only very low % of people who like interfaces to tell everything aka curated) OR amazing is not really AMAZING

    1. Logic 101 ftw

    2. amazing despite that being true. it has grown almost 600x in the 7 years we have been investors. i think that is 150% compound annual growth over those 7 years. i would characterize that as “amazing”

       1. Our brains are terrible at compounding benefit.That’s exciting though if that’s how well-structured, highly contextualized platforms end up reacting..

12. i think about how well Esty will handle the thundering herd moving to mobile. Pinterest is seeing a staggering shift..

    1. Staggering shift in which direction ?

       1. to mobile……

          1. “unsubscribe”Brittany Laughlin————–@br_ttany <http: http://www.twitter.com=“” br_ttany=””>

          2. Hehe. I guess I more was wondering what the stats were relating to that.

             1. they saw it go over 50% recently.

             2. Did they mention if that connected with any other behavior, perhaps them directing them via the web to download a new mobile app version, etc

             3. its to do with the thundering hurd moving to mobile – some companies see it quicker than others due to tactics – but the macro herd is moving en masse at this stage.

             4. Considering mobile phones are cheaper than laptops, more portable – which you could argue gives them more usefulness – that’s where people will more likely put their money.But I wonder if once saturated, and perhaps once people have more time to just sit down and connect online not mainly when in transit places – that if laptop sales and use will go up again.

             5. no chance.computing power in your pocket is the irreversable future. there is some much that is obselete about PCs today i would not know where to start.

             6. Never say never. 😉

    2. their iOS app is top twenty in its category (lifestyle). it has been top ten for much of its life (two years +) but probably suffering a bit from no iOS7 refresh so no featuring right now.their Android app is #11 in play store in its category (shopping)by the end of this year, Etsy will see more visits and more purchases on mobile (apps and mobile web) than desktop web. and the visits in the native apps convert materially better to transactions than desktop web.so i think mobile is a big plus for Etsy

13. This is one of those features that seems like it always should have been there 🙂

    1. yup

14. Oh, look, yet another Follow button! Am I the only one that keeps seeing new ones everywhere now?

    1. I commend Etsy for taking a needed step towards the curation that customers crave, but you’re right that this model is overused — there are better and more inventive ways to curate products in a marketplace. Too bad I don’t think any of the incumbents have it in the DNA to develop such ways.To me, the best way to do it is to have a unique way of curating **at the very core of your product** rather than as a mere feature. A marketplace built around discovering a products in a certain type of curatorial way — by location (Brooklyn vs. Bombay), by culture (urban vs. cowboy), by aesthetic (preppy vs. hipster), by publications that have written about it (Vogue vs. Vice), etc.Curation — which in UX terms is simply a meaningful way to filter beyond the norm (apparel, home, food, etc) — has to be at the core of the navigational experience of the product, not just an offshoot feature.

       1. I actually think it’s great that they provide a follow button. To me this is one of the ways to fix content discovery on the web and stop relying so much on search engines…

          1. I’m nnot bashing it. Its a nice, needed step for Etsy.But, eventually, another platform will need to push it further. Large scale e-commerce UX, specifically navigation and filtering, is broken. It’s just too hard to discover products you want when you don’t know exactly what you want. Its a massive problem, and this umpteenth example of a curator account + follow button is not about to fix it. But I’m sure it’ll make Etsy a better place today than it was yesterday.

    2. I like Follow buttons. They have a lot of value, they’re just not organized yet.

       1. Yup. I like them too and I hope they quickly get organized and work in a “decentralized” way when the user is not logged in. If I have don’t have an etsy account, I should still be able to follow one of these pages, using my RSS reader, or maybe one of the social webs silos (twitter… etc).

          1. Not sure that will ever happen through a company supporting it – they like to know who you’re following so they can try to build a profile of your interests, etc..

             1. But they also have to acknowledge that not all their visitors have an account (nor they will) with them and still need to provide the best non-logged-in experience to these… so maybe, we can make that happen 🙂

             2. This might work into what I am trying to do, probably would have room to collaborate too on it. Way too soon for me though to direct my thinking into this though unfortunately.Just followed you on Twitter, follow me back so have a quick way to DM in future? 🙂

15. Ha, my shopping addiction does notlike you right now :pBut this is overdue: Many brands (*coughurbanoutfiters*) did not play nicely with artisans on etsy. Now they can

16. How do the “curators” find the items they choose? Are they compensated for choosing items?

17. Thanks for the shout. I’ve found a ton of great stuff using magazines or pinterest to get ideas and then searching for them on Etsy. This helps skip a step.Without curation, how would I know that I wanted a wooden @ symbol to put on my bookshelf?! Got this one: http://www.etsy.com/listing… — and now I might add the # too.

18. Etsy never struck me as a marketplace where you go to when you’re looking for a very specific thing: it was always about the experience, and in the early days the whimsy of what you might find on the site and in individual storefronts. A few years ago they had a really cool color picker (click on a shade and it shows you all products in that shade) — that UX was so well executed, it stuck with me. So inspiration and ability to ‘accidentally’ discover things are at the core of the Etsy experience — curation is just a next step of putting more structure around accidentally discovering something you like (and actually increasing the chances & the frequency of that ‘oooh, nifty!’ moment).

    1. I loved that color picker feature! Curation is a starting place to wander into the door of Etsy. It’s the picture window of the site.

    2. I enjoyed that color picker too, really created an experience I remembered and lead me back to the site more than a few times.

19. I’m noticing a big trend in curation of the internet lately, and I recently made a web app that combines reading books and creating curated Pinterest boards of Etsy items. It’s somewhat similar to Etsy Pages, except the curator is the author of a novel that represents the theme of the Pinterest board. It’s up for public voting on Challenge Post now, and the demo video is on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/73877654

    1. Carrie this is great. We work with an author of ” plus size romance novels” and she hacked together her own approach to this–I’ll share your solution with her. I think she will be excited!

       1. That’s great Cynthia! I’m glad to hear it’s something people have been wishing for.

    2. that’s cool Carrie. thanks for sharing

       1. thanks 🙂

20. It’s the totally less funny Regretsy!Seriously though: this is good. Very smart move, aligning with B2B players.

21. This is a great new feature! This has been happening through the “Treasuries” that Etsy users can create as well as Bloggers/Lifestyle Gurus Pinning items to boards, but this will bring more focused visibility and a new audience to the site. As a sometime Etsy seller, this avenue for new exposure is most welcome, though I have heard the usual grumbling about “selling out”, going “corporate”, blah blah blah on the Etsy forums and other seller communities.I attended the Etsy conference in Berlin in 2011, and the main focus of the workshops was mostly about the nuts and bolts of running your creative business – marketing, partnering with other vendors/local shops, and so forth. I’m glad to see that they’re taking more of their own advice!