published in HOW magazine
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Inside Etsy
Ever wonder what it’s like to be a designer at Etsy? Get the scoop on how these in-house designers thrive within the walls of one the industry’s top creative hubs.
It’s like stepping into the whimsical world of a children’s storybook: A towering owl sculpture—known around here as Mr. Grit—is fashioned from cardboard and stands guard in the hall. Funky, oversized lamps dot the landscape like giraffes, leaning forward and almost nodding as you pass by.
Exposed duct work is wrapped in yards and yards of colorful, knitted yarns, creating a kaleidoscopic patchwork overhead. Intricately stitched quilts line one wall, announcing that you are in fact standing within the walls of the one and only craft mecca—Etsy.
BUILT BY HAND
Etsy.com was founded in 2005 by Rob Kalin, a twentysomething at the time who was searching for an online outlet to sell his handmade furniture. Upon discovering that no site catered to this market, he launched Etsy and sparked a handmade culture.
The site has become the online destination for anyone and everyone craving the crafted around the world, boasting more than 10 million members in 150 countries who bought and sold $314 million dollars worth of goods in 2010. Almost any craft-related or vintage item can be found on Etsy, from artwork and accessories to food and furniture.
Look around Etsy headquarters, and you’ll immediately get an idea of the variety sold on the site: Almost all the decorations and furnishings within the company were bought through Etsy, from the motley murals that adorn the walls down to the rustic farm tables the team eats on for lunch. Plus, when new employees are hired, the company gives them $100 to purchase goods from the site for personalizing their desks, which, by the way, are also handmade and one-of-a-kind.
In this way, the Etsy brand comes to life for its employees, as nearly everything they touch during their day in the office comes from one of the site’s vendors, whose heart and hands went into making each product. For the Etsy design team, all that artistry can’t help but be infectious.
“All of these things add up to an experience that is a good foundation for being creative,” says Etsy’s design director, Randy Hunt, as he looks around the office space that seems more like a playground than what you’d expect from a wildly successful dot-com business. But perhaps that’s exactly why the team has found such success: “You’re surrounded by creativity,” Hunt says.
KNIT TOGETHER
Hunt came on board in early 2010 after hitting it off with Etsy’s CEO. Prior to that, he had co-founded Supermarket, a curated design marketplace, and started a design studio called Citizen Scholar Inc. With only a few other designers on the Etsy team, Hunt went to work building the current design team of eight product designers and 11 product managers—an opportunity he embraced.
“When I started, I said, ‘I don’t want to work around people who suck,’” Hunt recalls. So he began seeking out creatives who could do more than simply design well. He envisioned a hybrid environment, where designers would sit down with engineers and write code together, where designers were just as likely to cull ideas from customers and service reps as they were from their fellow designers. In essence, he envisioned a workspace where collaboration is king.
To make that a reality, the company has strived to set up a process that makes collaboration easy and almost natural: Etsy employees sit in groups based on what they’re working on at a given time. But, those groups often change and desks get moved around quite a bit to encourage collaboration. (Hunt says he changes where he sits every few months.) Online, they have a design chat room that the team is logged in to all the time, where they can post their latest in-process designs and get input from one another. To kindle interaction between departments, the entire company chats on Internet Relay Chat, and they all eat lunch twice a week together. “These [built-in interactions] take a lot of the overhead of collaborating and communicating out of the equation,” Hunt says. “It makes it easier to be creative.”
The designers who work at Etsy agree.
“I’ve never had the ability to get to work with so many talented designers and engineers,” says product designer Magera Moon Holton. “I feel like I’m continually being pushed to be a better designer and loving every opportunity I get to collaborate with everyone here.”
Hunt adds, “If everyone on the team feels like everyone else is working better than them, then we’re in a good spot.”
GETTING CRAFTY
Hunt says that at any given time, the team is working on about two dozen projects. These range from those that are highly visible (such as designing iconography or building versions of the site for various audiences, such as mobile or international users) to many more that will likely go unnoticed by most visitors but make the site more user-friendly. “So much of what we do is really tiny changes,” Hunt says. “It might appear very, very small, but its impact can be quite large.”
Team members also occasionally have the opportunity to develop brand-new features with engineers, such as Etsy Taste Test, which is like Pandora for your Etsy browsing, suggesting new items perfectly suited to your preferences. Or, you’ll find the team’s influence on Whack-a-Treasury, a riff on the Whack-a-Mole arcade game that they debuted at Maker Faire, an event celebrating all things DIY. “There’s never a shortage of interesting and challenging problems to solve,” Holton says.
One of those challenges includes having to practice restraint, given the site’s sleek design where the emphasis is on simplicity. Hunt explains, “Quite intentionally, the aesthetic of product design on Etsy is very modernist and minimal. It’s a fine line of having almost no personality, and still knowing that it’s Etsy. That’s because the experience on Etsy should be all about the content that our users put up.”
And there’s a lot of content that Etsy users (known as “Etsians”) put up: In May 2011, more than 2 million items were sold; about 400,000 new members signed up; and the site received close to 1 billion page views.
For the designers who work at Etsy, that’s quite an audience. You might expect that, given all those onlookers, they might dither over every design change. As it turns out, that assumption couldn’t be further from the truth.
“We’ve embraced agile development,” Hunt says, noting that about 20 changes are deployed to the public daily. He explains their work philosophy: “Share your design often and early; it doesn’t have to be finished. We believe in continuous improvement, so we go on and send things out today, because tomorrow we can make it better.”
To make this possible, every designer has direct access to the site’s production code and makes changes themselves. Hunt explains that this freedom is a great motivator for the team. “They get to experience the joys of sending out their work to millions of people constantly,” he says. “You feel true ownership over what you’re working on—and a responsibility to the people who are actually using the product.”
A COMMON THREAD
In fact, the people who use Etsy are just as likely to be the folks who work there as anyone else. Hunt admits that even at home, much of his apartment is decorated in Etsy finds. That’s because the folks who work at the company are among some of its biggest fans.
“I very genuinely believe in what Etsy stands for,” Hunt says. “Etsy has this set of values revolving around authenticity, mindfulness, and people being who they are. We believe that must be reflected in everything we do. It’s important to us to embody those things.”
It’s almost surprising at how deeply those values filter down into what goes on at Etsy. For instance, encouraging a community of crafters doesn’t stop at the online site. Instead, Etsy opens its doors every week to the public for Craft Nights in the Etsy Labs, free events where folks can come use their equipment and supplies, learn a new skill or two, and soak up the collective creativity.
Etsy also believes in mindful consumption, knowing where your purchases come from and valuing quality over price and convenience. They quickly connected this idea to the food they eat, which is why twice a week, the company caters locally-sourced, sustainable meals for the affair that has become known around here as Eatsy.
That a company lives out its commitments so fully is one of the things that inspires Etsy’s designers the most. When asked what she likes best about working at Etsy, Holton replies, “The culture. Everyone at Etsy truly embodies what we are all working towards: creating a space where individuals can create what they love and make a living doing it.”
In the midst of this curiosity-filled wonderland, they only have to look around them—at the hand-drawn sketches on the wall that commemorate the company’s fifth birthday or the conference room themed like a space ship—to be reminded of all the creativity that this workplace sparks, not only within its own walls, but also the world over.
