As you may have already heard, Etsy will be banning the sale of adult toys in less than 30 days. This includes items that are penetrative like dildos or strokers. This ban will in effect shut the lights off on many makers, essentially overnight. But this isn't the first time Etsy has changed or enacted policies that have directly impacted the handmade makers of fantasy toys.
Close to a year and a half ago, Etsy quietly updated their policies on the sale of tentacle toys and other creaturely designs, and without warning starting deactivating listings left and right for handmade sellers. Many of us refer to this time period as "The Purge". It seemed as though Etsy was directly attacking adult toy companies, and with little explanation as to why. Later it was discovered that tentacles among other descriptive terms for fantasy toys was changed to prohibited without any type of notification to the sellers that would be impacted. For those of us who survived the purge, the past year and a half has been an absolute nightmare.
From sleepless nights to panic stricken days, we lived on the edge of our seat. At any moment Etsy could change their opinion on anything, update a policy in the middle of the night and immediately enforce it. We were lucky enough to survive the purge, but in many ways it was also a curse. Because that is when Etsy as a platform began to fall.
Changes after changes have been made to the platform over the past year, from search engine manipulation, to pressure to launch paid ads and all the while Etsy also cut their support staff down to bare bones and gave AI bots the power to destroy lives. The bots crawled the platform constantly, shutting down shops that were not breaking any rules. They deactivated listings without cause or a reason. And each of these strikes count against your shop ranking in some undefined yet ever important way. Etsy began suppressing those who performed well, and also those who underperformed. Everyone was punished. And no one was safe.
There was no winning.
And where does this leave us now? Less than 30 days to pivot, to find a new home, to make a new plan. It means heartbreaking conversations with our incredible employees about inevitable layoffs when 80% of the revenue vanishes into thin air. It means struggling to survive, simply because a platform decided the small businesses that helped build them up weren't worthy of a longer notice. Etsy does not care about their makers. Etsy does not care about their integrity. And after the past year and a half of terrible leadership by CEO Josh Silverman, they clearly do not care about their reputation.
We hope to see all the small makers on the other side of this terrible storm. We hope we can somehow pull off a miracle in less than a month to keep our shop family together. We are lucky enough to have a website already running and we hope to see our Etsy customers join us there. The community of makers and customers is one that is hard to fracture and the love and support during this time is overwhelming.
We have no intention of going anywhere. We have no intention of bending a knee to the monster that Etsy has become. Instead, we will carry on to a better and safer place as a business. We hope to avoid what seems to be the inevitable drop in sales coming soon, but we are also preparing in any way we can. If we are anything, we are creative and stubborn which will hopefully help us navigate the coming days and months.
Etsy is like the job you wanted to quit, but got fired from before you had the chance. We wish we could say we wish Etsy well, but more appropriately we hope "it has the day it deserves".