Crafting connections

Our community is the heart and soul of Etsy. Getting to know our sellers and buyers personally helps connect our employees to the purpose of our work and helps ensure we are building Etsy for the long-term success of our community.

Taking time for member support

Every employee across the company is encouraged to work alongside our Support Team responding to inquiries from our members. During these support rotations, Etsy employees who don’t work in Support roles connect directly to our members and get a deeper understanding of the challenges our members encounter. These touch points with users inform employees’ day-to-day work, helping us all build better products to serve our members and grow our business.

Visiting sellers’ workspaces

Another way we get to know our sellers is by meeting them in person in the spaces where they create their products and manage their shops. Seller studio visits give Etsy employees from all departments a firsthand account of seller workflows and a deeper understanding of the seller experience. Talking to shop owners about their businesses reminds us why what we do matters. It also helps us understand how to improve our service and our platform. We ask the same core set of questions during each visit, and the information is tracked and submitted to our product and seller development teams on a regular basis.

In 2015, 341 employees visited 42 sellers in their studios in nine cities: New York City, Hudson, Toronto, Dublin, Paris, London, San Francisco, Amsterdam, and Berlin.

Home for the Holidays

Since 2010, Etsy employees have spent quality time with the local Etsy community in their hometowns through a series of gatherings called Home for the Holidays. At these events, Etsy sellers and Etsy employees connect informally, often over a beer and snacks at a local bar, and share their experiences.

We love the chance to meet sellers in real life outside of the cities where we have offices. By giving more Etsy employees opportunities to meet sellers and giving more sellers the chance to meet employees, we’re investing in a dialogue that informs all of our work.

In 2015, Etsy employees hosted 25 Home for the Holidays events with 312 sellers around the world. Check out this blog post to read more about our 2015 Home for the Holidays and sign up for the Etsy Success Newsletter to be sure you know if Home for the Holidays is coming to your town in 2016.