twopointouch

At FOWA yesterday, one of the most interesting presentations came from the founder of etsy - a marketplace for handcrafted items - Robert Kalin.

Kalin is like a Web 2.0 version of Holden Caulfield - he starts his talk:

…dropped out of high school at 15. ran away to live in boston with my uncle, who was like the purple sheep of the family. eventually found my way to new york. had about 15 jobs. i was a carpenter for a while. that stuff is brutal. started to want to get an education but couldn’t pay. so i attended classes at about 8 different colleges using stolen IDs. doing it this way meant i really took ownership of my education…

And so on. He hasn’t got any slides: he’s typing addresses into his web browser to bring up pictures he’s posted to his blog. He’s chewing gum while he speaks, which is amplified by his microphone. Some of his demos aren’t working.

It’s pretty weird, but also absolutely mesmerising. Etsy is an arts and crafts marketplace, but it’s also, as it turns out, a challenge to the state of commerce on the web.

Regular commerce has become less and less about people and the inherent value of objects. This is reflected by the history of money. Money used to be made out of gold - coins had an inherent value. Then came banknotes, which were symbols of value rather than possessing a real value themselves. Now it’s about credit cards - money has become 1s and 0s flying across the Internet. At the same time, corporations own all the means of production and distribution. Commerce has become utterly dehumanised and psychotic.

Etsy began with the idea of a marketplace. But a return to what a marketplace used to mean before the twentieth century. Marketplaces used to be communities, places where people exchanged stories and news as well as money and goods. Because etsy is just for handcrafted, bespoke items, it brings the humanity back into trade. Every item is its own story and has a human face attached to it. This means that etsy attracts and retains audiences. People talk about what they’re buying and selling, because the items are interesting and unique of themselves. Buyers develop relationships with sellers and maybe ask for a personalised version of items they’re interested in. The software is supposedly finding ways to increase the face-to-face contact between members, to add a bit of a virtual world element, but it isn’t working today.

But the broader premise of the site is working. Etsy has 100,000 sellers listing 10,000 items a day.

Really interesting stuff - the more virtual many aspects of our lives are becoming, the greater the value being put on personal and personalised relationships, services and items, like we’re unconsciously reaching for balance.