Word on the Street: Crowdsourcing and Your Etsy Business

girlscantell

Story by girlscantell

Published on Mar 31, 2010 in Seller Handbook

Photo by girlscantell

Sara_bio.jpgSara Selepouchin, a.k.a girlscantell, has been making and selling her line of hand-printed housewares full time since January 2009. She’s been an Etsy seller and has been blogging regularly since 2006. You might recognize her as former Etsy Admin, sarawearsskirts. 

When I began selling my housewares full time, I knew I had to do something to set myself apart from all of the other fantastic designers and makers of housewares out there. While I was confident that my work was likable, sell-able and unique, it dawned on me that the likes of Martha Stewart would make for pretty stiff competition in the global housewares marketplace. Crowd_work.jpg

In determining a business plan, I opted to use the small size of my business (you can’t get much smaller than a one-person business, right?) to my advantage. While big companies can take out fancy advertisements, do tons of market research, and hire gobs of people to handle various facets of design and production, small businesses have agility on their side. So I decided to use my trusty Typepad blog to my advantage and make exactly what people told me they wanted. Readers could suggest a diagram, and within a matter of days, I would draw it, burn it onto a silkscreen, print the design up in my little studio, have it offered for sale in my Etsy shop and, of course, use my blog to announce the new goods.

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As anticipated, this sort of interaction with my customers has been incredibly fun and kept me rather busy. Another fantastic result has been that this process sparks ideas for diagram designs that I might have never come up with on my own. Many of my best-selling illustration designs were suggestions or off-shoots of suggestions from craft show patrons or visitors to my blog and website, where there’s a handy form for making suggestions.

screen_process.jpgPlainly put, crowdsourcing is just a fancy term for listening to a dispersed group of people and reacting to their feedback. At its best, the practice involves taking the most wonderful ideas from your fan base and incorporating them into your business or project on some level. Through the magic of the Internet, there are many easy ways you can crowdsource to your Etsy shop’s benefit. These methods include engaging customers in conversation through comments on your blog, through Twitter and Facebook interactions, or through occasional emails with an opt-in email blast, to name a few. Don’t forget that follow-through (going back to post updates, results and new work on your blog) is one of the most important steps.

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Whichever way you choose to go about your crowdsourcing, customers will be thrilled to see their ideas come to life in your products. To figure out what works best for your shop, try out a few different ways of interacting with your customer-base. Don’t be afraid to change plans as you go along. After all, that’s the best part of being a tiny business.

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