Requiem for an Etsy Shop

At a feminist circle full of posh academics I was asked what I do. “I have a handmade business,” I said. I was proud of my wee Etsy shop, called Feral Strumpet. I earned me more peddling jewellery on the internet than at University lecture gigs in the USA. I had a better quality of life than when I was working the soul-deadening job processing expense reports for an investment bank in the City of London. I had enough business acumen to support myself for over a decade, allowing my husband to quit his job and join me. My handmade business meant freedom and autonomy, but this academic with a Mulberry handbag dismissed it as “Victorian Piecework.” 

My CV looked like something a stranded time traveller might put together. 

What did she know? I was a self-taught metalsmith with a room in my house devoted to my workshop. This felt like a huge step up from chronic unemployment, yet I knew I was also a joke, my vocation an airhead’s ambition.

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 A lot can happen in fourteen years—that’s how long I have had an Etsy shop. I opened the shop after being unemployed for six years—my visa status allowed me to work, but it was difficult to convince a potential British employer of this. I was too educated, too foreign, too sick to work a regular job in the UK. Eventually my CV looked like something a stranded time traveller might put together. 

Out of desperation, I decided I would make jewellery and peddle it on Etsy. I had a box of broken vintage jewellery, beads and findings and a table in a rented house. This went so well it sustained me, three cats and a man for over a decade. But it’s over now. I won’t bore you with the details. Etsy fees and draconian surveillance have crippled handmade businesses as the company answers to pressure from investors. I’m just one of thousands who had to flee. 

As a disabled person, I rely entirely on the gig economy

I knew I’d have to shut the Etsy shop sooner or later, but I was so attached to it, so goddamn sentimental. I thought I could outsmart the Etsy Overloards in a Saul Goodman kind of way. For years, I did—bouncing back after many challenges: the algorithm stranglehold on social media, the loss of my European customers after Brexit (a third of my customer base, gone.) The suppliers I worked with for a decade—independent, ethical and small—went out of business. My chronic pain reached critical mass so I paced the work out and taught my partner to make some of the designs. There was the Royal Mail cyber attack and the pandemic, and still I bounced back.

I’ve sold pieces to doom metal rock stars, poets, feminist screenwriters and even once to Peaky Blinders’ costumer.

Yet now the only way to survive on Etsy is to churn out repeatable designs at low cost or become a reseller of mass produced goods. This is the business model Etsy rewards, and I can go no farther. 

As a disabled person, I rely entirely on the gig economy—making jewellery, teaching online workshops writing on Substack, and selling a next book if I can. All require constant promotion and rejection cycles, the antithesis of creative joy. 

Fourteen years ago, before the online marketplace went public, Etsy was different. My very first sale on Etsy was an pair of Edwardian filigree chandelier earrings I’d refurbished, sold to a dear friend of mine from High School. I’ve sold pieces to strangers whose names I recognised and whose work I have loved—doom metal rock stars, poets, feminist screenwriters and even once to Peaky Blinders’ costumer. I modelled as a pirate queen for the label of a fellow Etsy seller’s perfume. Sellers shared ideas and knowledge and my success is down to the shared grit and resilience of the community of artists on Etsy in those early days.

I’m lucky though that I have had so much excitement and happiness being an Etsy seller, and this continues on my independent shop, in new and exciting ways. My independent shop remains open! feralstrumpet.com. Now I’m freed up; I’m mourning. Perhaps these two things are inseparable. 

Missives from the Verge with Allyson Shaw is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.