Etsy, cheap art and the issue of change

A cou­ple of weeks ago I came across a post on craftmba.com about the impact of under­pric­ing and gen­eral cheap­ness that seems to be caus­ing havoc within Etsy. The range of the com­ments illus­trated the depth of this issue and which I main­tain is the log­i­cal out­come of an over­all par­a­digm shift based clash between the old way of per­ceiv­ing and doing work and the com­ing new ways. If you’ve stud­ies the nature of rev­o­lu­tions and change you know that there is always a time of con­flict and fear as the com­ing change over­laps and increas­ingly threat­ens the old way of doing things.

Because of not only the com­plex­ity of this issue and its’ impor­tance I decided to keep the con­ver­sa­tion going here by start­ing out with my com­ments in response to the post on craftmba.com. I also encour­age all who who rec­og­nize the impor­tance of this dis­cus­sion to chime in, add a com­ment, write your arti­cle and I’ll post it here.

We are in it and all to blame…

The cul­ture of cheap took  hold a long time ago and we are now see­ing the extreme results. Ellen Rup­pel Shell’s excel­lent book “Cheap: The High Cost of Dis­count Cul­ture” really cov­ers the issue. Also Dan Ariely’s book “Pre­dictably Irra­tional” pro­vides new insights through research he and oth­ers con­ducted at MIT and elsewhere.

The issue is both cul­tural and maker related as was pointed out in Ellen Rup­pel Shell’s book. It’s also an issue that not only effects folks on Etsy or hand made cre­ators it is an issue related to our fun­da­men­tal abil­ity to value things cre­ated from our hearts.

I’ve expe­ri­enced the prob­lem of devalu­ing cre­ativ­ity for decades not only as artist  but also as a designer, archi­tect, and pho­tog­ra­pher. The prob­lem has its’ basis in an his­tor­i­cal fail­ure of cre­atives to de-commoditize  their work.  I don’t think this is pur­pose­ful, but instead comes from lack of knowl­edge, a his­tor­i­cally neg­a­tive view of sell­ing art, a short­age of the tools needed to seri­ously mar­ket what we cre­ate and plane old fear dri­ven by our lizard brain the amygdala.

We are expe­ri­enc­ing one of the most rapidly chang­ing times in his­tory, as the web becomes more and more inter­ac­tive and avail­able which in turn  spawns research and new par­a­digms for mar­ket­ing. These new mod­els have their foun­da­tion in our increas­ing abil­ity to iden­tify those who relate to what we make, which in the end shifts the focus from our work as com­mod­ity to our work as some­thing that reflects who we are, ulti­mately plac­ing the value on us as the cre­ators and empha­siz­ing the link between our vision and what we produce.

Crowd sourc­ing and democracy

The democ­ra­ti­za­tion of both the means of pro­duc­tion  and the sales process through sites like Etsy  I think in the long run will likely cre­ate a strat­i­fi­ca­tion in the handmade/creative world where the lower price points are cov­ered by entry and or ama­teur cre­ators and the mid to high price points ded­i­cated to the expe­ri­enced artists. Con­sider the fol­low­ing example:

The emer­gence of what I call Uncle Bob’s and Deb­bie Dig­i­tals (very ama­teur pho­tog­ra­phers) in the pho­tog­ra­phy mar­ket espe­cially wed­ding pho­tog­ra­phy, caused a sig­nif­i­cant stir. When they first showed up, pho­tog­ra­phers were out­raged at the fact that these inex­pe­ri­enced peo­ple were under­cut­ting their work, when in fact all they were doing was car­ry­ing the com­modi­ti­za­tion to its’ extreme. Pre­vi­ous to dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy like art the focus of stu­dio pho­tog­ra­phers was on print sales with vir­tu­ally no atten­tion paid to includ­ing the cost of the photographer’s skill, because the mys­tique of film, kept the pro­fes­sional ranks closed.

That all changed as dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy emerged, but it took quite a while before pho­tog­ra­phers saw the error of their ways and started to refo­cus their mar­ket­ing efforts to the value of their skills as opposed to the price of a piece of paper.  The indus­try has now rec­og­nized that there will always be clients who only care about price and don’t even con­sider value or qual­ity. Con­se­quently, pho­tog­ra­phers are now rebrand­ing them­selves, actively par­tic­i­pat­ing in social media and devel­op­ing fol­low­ers through their blogs. While the indus­try is still in the process of seg­ment­ing and shift­ing, more and more poten­tial clients are see­ing and valu­ing the skills and vision the pho­tog­ra­pher brings to them.

The same thing could hap­pen with hand made work and like pho­tog­ra­phy there will always be those who feel com­fort­able as com­modi­ties and because the knowl­edge is now avail­able to those who want to develop their own mar­kets regard­less of geog­ra­phy or other pre­vi­ous lim­i­ta­tions, they will be free to grow as much as they desire.

So instead of every­one com­pet­ing as com­modi­ties by price point the hand­made indus­try can grow into a very diverse com­mu­nity. And, the abil­ity to develop mul­ti­ple income streams from hand­made work will help the entire com­mu­nity as mak­ers, sell their work in dif­fer­ent mar­kets, become men­tors and even teach.

There are a num­ber of ways this can all sift out...one way is for expe­ri­enced creators/makers to help part time or emerg­ing cre­ators learn how to build their niche and buyer fol­low­ing. The result will likely be a change in buyer behav­ior as more and more cre­ators de-commoditize their work. Pro­duc­ing  more peo­ple with hand made work in their lives because they see and value the effect it has on their every­day lives. In the process, artists and other cre­ators will clar­ify who their work is really for and develop their buy­ers into a loyal fol­low­ing of peo­ple who value their work.

One thing I do know is that change is cer­tain and things are chang­ing so fast, expos­ing more and more oppor­tu­ni­ties at smaller scales than ever before.