Focus.de Interview

A few months ago I met with Janko Röttgers, a German journalist living in LA, to discuss how wonderful Etsy is! The piece was for a German online zine called Focus. The whole thing is in German, so I have no idea what it really says, but I translated it in Sherlock, and here is what I get:

"it is great. Fantastisch. Madly." Michelle Caplan can hardly seize
their enthusiasm into words, if she speaks about the on-line
commercial platform Etsy. Etsy is a market place for handmade. More
than 140,000 artists and other creative humans sell there decoration,
handgeschneiderte clothes, even sketched, non-standard arranged
greeting cards and so on. ABOUT interview: Renaissance of the handmade
Caplan uses the platform for approximately one year, in order to offer
her collages and printing consisting of old photos and newspaper
articles for the purchase. Etsy helped to make from its hobby an
occupation reports into of Los Angeles living artist. "I won thereby
even customers from the foreign country", so Caplan. "I do not know,
why it gave such a thing not already in former times."

Buy after colours

Etsy.com is part of a new generation of on-line supplies, which
connect a buying with new Web technologies and a InterNet-typical
community feeling - a combination, which is called also Social
Shopping. Etsy users can structure as with MySpace connections among
themselves. Over these connections then again dealer with similar
products lets itself be found.

Etsy sets besides on a whole number of innovative items, in order to
simplify consumers a discovering of new products. Thus the entire
catalog can be searched on the basis a color matrix. This displays
then for example handmade bookmarks, smell cushions and illustrations,
which possess all the same blue value.

Better than Ebay

Michelle Caplan believes that such spielerischen discovery
journeys are ideal for art and handmade. "you show things, which one
would not find otherwise", explains her. On traditional sales
platforms one would be neglectable as a niche provider against it much
too fast. "nobody clicks itself by 15 pages of full art articles" to
report white it from own experience as a former Ebay ebay-Haendlerin. . . .

As you can see, the translation is a bit funky, but I think you can get the idea. The article goes on to talk about ThisNext, and Threadless as well. You can see the German version here.