Etsy is an online, peer-to-peer, e-commerce forum that hosts the webstores of individual “makers” who market their products to their personal audiences, as well as Esty shoppers. This company fills a gentrified niche in the e-commerce environment, which has been made possible and left open by e-commerce giants like eBay and Amazon. The Anthropologie effect permeates digital design in this space, as it incorporates both the aesthetic implications of the gentrification of a product’s visual presentation and the economic implications of the gentrification of a producer’s marketing strategy.
ETSY:
DIGITAL GENTRIFICATION OF DESIGN
A self-described global community of entrepreneurs, shoppers, manufacturers, and employees, Etsy has developed into a formidable marketplace within the e-commerce realm. Founded in 2005, now supporting 1.6 million active makers and 24 million active shoppers, all whom have registered accounts, the site supported $2.39 billion in annual gross merchandise sales in 2015. This online community encourages customization of products, which, thanks to the hyper-connectedness afforded by the technological age, allows a customer to find a product that fits his or her exact specifications at any time. By operating under a mantra of “reimagining commerce” and maintaining a “spirit of handmade,” Etsy fills a space within the e-commerce realm with a mindset of customization and individualization. This mindset is enacted in uniformity across the Etsy platform, embodying the Anthropologie effect, or gentrification of design.
Etsy provides a unique intersection of the irony of the Anthropologie effect; it maintains the individualist “uniquely-pretty” mentality with its maker model, while still being built within a corporately organized structure. Etsy’s business model acknowledges the commercialization required for a seller to turn a profit, yet still manages to promote the uniqueness of each of its makers and customers.
E-COMMERCE DESIGN
Etsy allows “makers” to sell their individualized wares to customers across the globe. The “maker mindset” that Etsy champions allows modern crafters to sell their wares at a better profit than traditional crafters. Traditional crafters would spend much more pre-sale capital on web design or craft fair booths than Etsy’s makers do now. While the makers earn higher profits, Etsy also earns a profit in hosting fees and advertisements. This business model allows both the maker community and Etsy to profit from consumers who have come to design their lifestyles under the influence of the Anthropologie effect.
This business model and marketing strategy is par for the course in the e-commerce realm; eBay mastered this model and strategy long before Etsy was in the development stages. Etsy’s ability to fill the craft-inflected, gentrified design niche of e-commerce does depend on this basic model and strategy. However, it thrives in this niche because it fosters gentrified design in both the physical and digital space. The handmade, customizable products that Etsy hosts are the heart of this physically gentrified design. Yet the gentrification of the design of the digital space that hosts these products is the heart of Etsy’s success as an Anthropologie-affected e-commerce forum. The Anthropologie effect is highly apparent in Etsy’s site and user-interface design, and is even more noticeable during comparison to the site and user-interface design of other e-commerce sites, such as eBay.
While Etsy and eBay use similar approaches to site design, Etsy’s approach is better targeted toward the Anthropologie-affected customer base, as it utilizes a gentrification of digital design. Etsy’s landing page is noticeably less busy than eBay’s. This reduced business is a combination of Etsy’s use of more neutral space and a smaller picture-to-text ratio, which keeps the merchandise pictures from overwhelming the user’s eye. In comparison, eBay uses large pictures, which consume a majority of the screen, which distract from the product description and make the digital space busier. While eBay’s landing page utilizes wide margins to leverage white space, Etsy’s opening banner makes better use of the wide screen presentation by utilizing its entire width before introducing wider margins for the rest of the user’s interaction with the merchandise. eBay’s use of immediately wide margins crowds the page’s content into a smaller space, making the page feel busy and overwhelming.
Additionally, Etsy’s use of smaller images and larger text permits a subtlety that is absent within eBay’s homepage. Etsy also protects its branding by omitting exterior advertisements on its homepage; eBay’s use of marketing revenue reduces the power of the eBay brand by putting it in competition with other advertisements. A lack of external advertisements lends Etsy a cleaner, calmer atmosphere.
At each turn, the user is invited to interact with Etsy’s simple, elegant branding throughout the shopping experience. This phenomenon is wholly dependent on Etsy’s presentation of its maker’s shops and categories for perusing customizable wares. In turn, this presentation is dependent on Etsy’s use of the Anthropologie effect, in presenting a gentrified digital design.
INTERNAL DESIGN
In the same way that the Anthropologie effect allows consumers to enact their individuality in uniformity, Etsy offers the same option to its maker community. While the wares each seller presents are uniquely made by a specific set of hands, the hands that access the shop all do so through the same window. Besides a difference in the pictures on each shop site, everything on Etsy is uniform. Surely, this is necessary to ensuring the success of Etsy through branding and ethos presentation, which build a relationship with the company’s customers. However, this limits an individual maker’s ability to develop a unique branding ethos. Ultimately, this system chiefly benefits the host site, although the makers and consumers are still able to participate in Etsy’s e-commerce community.
As with the physical gentrification of design, the subtleties of the digital gentrification of design extend to economic and ethical implications. Sites such as Etsy who use the Anthropologie effect to persuade both customers (in this case, as both makers and shoppers) market the idea of individuality through customizability while delivering a highly uniform experience. As with the physical interpretations of the Anthropologie effect, the price of customizability, and seeming individuality, makes interacting with this phenomenon unwittingly hazardous. Since Etsy has come to fill a gentrified niche within the e-commerce industry, the company can leverage its position to corner the Anthropologie-affected market. Again, individual identities are subjected to mass-produced marketing strategies passed off under a guise of customizability. While conscious interaction with this phenomenon could be criticized, a larger concern must be held for those who unconsciously participate in the reproduction of the Anthropologie effect without understanding why they are doing so.
This is especially true in the digital realm, where social media is even more prevalent than a company-organized hashtag, as is the case with Anthropologie. Etsy, and other companies that follow the digitally gentrified design model, are granted direct access to their customer’s digitally composed identities. Such access affects not only how consumers interact with the companies directly, but also how they interact with their social networks about the companies. This next step makes the Anthropologie effect even more personal, which I am keenly interested in. Read on to learn more about my relationship with the Anthropologie effect.
Esty’s focus on driving new, creative entrepreneurship encourages makers to participate in the “Etsy economy’s” building process. By fostering this maker community, Etsy takes on a secondary type of consumer base, apart from the customers that purchase wares from these makers. As such, advertisements and branding must be directed toward both Etsy’s shoppers and makers. Again, this process is not unique to Etsy within the e-commerce realm, but Etsy’s approach to the process is definitively marked by a gentrified design. Guides and advertisements for makers focus on encouraging the creativity, rather than the business management knowledge, of each individual artist. By highlighting the creative process through clean, simple, engaging designs, Etsy encourages the perpetuation of the Anthropologie effect within its own structure.