Name: What Happened To Etsy?
Uploaded: 2024-02-18T07:15:38.000Z
Duration: 12 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Etsy, the global e-commerce platform known for unique and

handmade goods, reported its highest ever annual revenue of

Its gross merchandise sales, or the total value of goods

sold on Etsy, declined in the same period, falling flat for

It stocks its more than 70% lower than its 2021 high, and

first quarter 2024 earnings results didn't look much

Etsy's consolidated results, while within our guidance

range, were not where we wanted them to be.

After the big increase in both buyers and spending per buyer

during Covid, it looks like they've hit a wall and you

basically have a company that has not grown in two years.

Some longtime sellers are partly blaming CEO Josh

Silverman, saying his focus on profits has pushed the

company away from its vision, allowing counterfeits and mass

produced items to thrive, demoralizing artists and

Competing with people who are generating art via artificial

You're just going to be a slightly more expensive

Amazon. That seems like a terrible business plan.

With discretionary spending down a first quarter 2024 miss

in both merchandise sales and profits, and an acknowledgment

of poor execution by its CEO, Etsy's future is uncertain.

Its job is to return value to shareholders.

At the end of the day, they need to be able to sell things

When Etsy first came on the market in 2005, it was a

People who loved arts and crafts finally had a place to

buy those things all the time and get connected with sellers

and artisans and artists who maybe they would have never

Etsy's founder and then CEO, Rob Kalin built the platform

His vision was that Etsy could influence society in a

way that people would think more consciously about the

How do you get from just doing it as more of a hobby, to

organizing this to the point where you can actually make a

The virtual storefront also enabled a new kind of

These small businesses, these local artists, suddenly had

the ability to connect with buyers all over the world.

I mean, it was an opportunity for them to grow their brand,

Nicole Aline Legault and Chiarra Lohr are just two of

the many artists who joined Etsy to sell more of their

Everyone that I knew was opening up a little shop

because it was one of the only places that was offering

They were really driving the traffic and making the site

Etsy received B Corporation status in 2012, and was one of

the first companies with that certification to complete an

At the time, it was valued at $1.8 billion, but the cracks

in Etsy's foundation were already forming.

Kalin stepped down as CEO in 2011 for a second time.

As competition was stiffening, the next CEO made

a big change in 2013, allowing artists to use

outside manufacturers to produce their designs.

And in this new public arena, the company was beholden to

financially focused shareholders with a laser

Etsy's stock lost more than 70% of its value its first

From the beginning, Etsy wasn't profitable.

You know, when it went public, it was deeply in the

red. This wasn't uncommon for e-commerce companies.

It's still not necessarily uncommon for disruptive new

startups and things like that. But over time, you

Vendors, too, were unhappy for different reasons.

There's been a massive culture clash at Etsy.

It's something that really started after the company went

public. It's happening internally with employees who

had been there since the beginning, had kind of seen

Josh Silverman made both short and long term changes,

laying off 22% of Etsy's workforce that year and later

pushing through transaction fee hikes and shipping fees.

He also introduced a new tier -based subscription model for

sellers to jumpstart their growth--at a cost.

It's ultimately like maybe too focused on keeping the sellers

happy and wasn't doing enough to kind of drive buyer

satisfaction. So that's what Josh tended to focus on, you

know, kind of maybe more balancing both sides of a

Subtitles ListPlay Video

What Happened To Etsy?

ultimately

pandemic

prioritize

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