90% of everything is crap. 90% of crafting is marketing.

The top sellers on Etsy have one thing in common: superior marketing. It’s not about your product, it’s about how you market yourself and your product – and that goes doubly when it comes to handmade, because with handmade products you’re buying one or more of the following value propositions:

• Superior workmanship
• Personalized service
• Uniqueness
• Attention to detail
• Environmental friendliness
• Buying directly from an artisan
• Etc.

In other words, it’s not just about buying a necklace for your girlfriend: it’s about buying a one-of-a-kind hat from Theresa in Vermont (or wherever) who dyes her own wool and has a really charming blog and a killer email newsletter. It’s about marketing – all that stuff that transforms a necklace into a necklace I need to have.

When something is more expensive by dint of being one-of-a-kind and handmade, marketing becomes essential. Handmade items are unique by definition, so being unique isn’t enough.
Plus, Etsy is a marketplace that is flooded with products and sellers. Most of those products are crap, and all sellers are competing for the same small group of buyers.

And to top it all off, Etsy’s site search is rather useless, so search optimization techniques aren’t enough to get eyeballs on your product.

If I ever found myself teaching a marketing course, I would have my students open a shop on Etsy and give them a budget (say, $300) to cover craft materials, marketing expenses, and Etsy fees. The students who sold the most stuff would get a good grade.

At first blush, this plan seems terribly unfair to students who aren’t artistically inclined, but honestly? A good marketer can sell the ugliest, stupidest product with clever marketing techniques, and I think this plan would illustrate that principle quite well.

The truly savvy (and cynical) students would spend minimal time and money on materials for whatever they’re selling in their shop. The smarter ones would focus on marketing, as well as carving out their own special niche on Etsy (for example, jewelry is the most saturated category on Etsy, which suggests that I am terrible at taking my own advice). They would be able to use whatever online or offline marketing channels they wished (including affiliate programs, word of mouth, banner ads, paid search, social media…the list goes on).

The wrinkle in all of this is that Etsy gives sellers zero stats, so you (or my fictional students) have no idea of telling where your sales are coming from. Short of clairvoyance, it’s impossible to know whether that banner ad or email blast drove sales, or whether it’s a total waste of money. (Customer surveys are a possibility, but seem hopelessly quaint in this era of sophisticated and free Web analytics systems.)

Anyway.

Since I do marketing during the day and Etsy-type activities at night, the intersection between the two is pretty interesting to me. Oh yes…something as banal as marketing has such an effect on the pure and noble activity of crafting. The horror.

(Sorry for the lack of pretty pictures in this post. I will have more, and more specific, things to say on this subject soon.)