Posted by resonanteye on 04/23/2012
I am exhausted and I can’t get wordpress to load edit pages, so I can’t add any more stuff to my previous post. I’m just going to make a cup of chai.
Plus, I’m really irate about all this right now, so my day started out on that note.
Anyway, until tomorrow…xox
dammit it won’t even load a picture. ah well.
here are some pretty things to go peek at until I get back.
Jim said
That lady is totally hot. I don’t know how the hell classrooms are going to be “filled” with $400 chairs. And I have no idea what the fuck is going on with the controversy. Is she claiming “hand-made” when it’s not, or something?
resonanteye said
yep. you can only sell handmade things YOU made, on etsy. so…there she is, buying at cost from indonesian factories, and reselling on there
the furor is because etsy featured her on their front page, thereby promoting her.
Jim said
I see. So is the furniture being delivered to her with assembly instructions or something, then? I read some of the comments and read the article, and it sounds like there is some grey area or something.
resonanteye said
she’s well out of the grey area. she’s a distributor for a wholesale furniture seller.
mass-produced stuff is technically not allowed on etsy. technically. and they will shut down smaller shops for doing it. BUT, they have a history of allowing some people to skim under the radar. So it’s not really applied fairly. This seller was featured- kept on their front page, garnering thousands of views and many sales- they vetted and approved her.
the furniture is shipped to her as finished furniture. Like…you can’t buy IKEA, put it together, and then re-sell it there. Know what I mean? You can’t just follow instructions to assemble a thing, sold as that thing.
You CAN follow a pattern to make yarn into a sweater, say. BUT the “assembly” there is the MAJORITY of the work. the rules on etsy say the seller has to have done THE MAJORITY of the work on the item- which she has not (or her customs papers would say “wood”, not “furniture”)
also, the furniture is commercially available elsewhere. it’s mass-produced. by someone who isn’t her. so either way it’s not supposed to even BE on etsy, let alone featured there.
The worst part is that instead of addressing the problem, they’ve been closing down discussions there about it, and haven’t removed her, or her interview (which was mostly lies)
the hens in the henhouse are clucking.
Jim said
Wow, that’s pretty shitty. Yeah, I could see from the comments that people were pretty pissed off. Doesn’t seem fair to knock out the smaller people just to turn right around and let someone else do the same thing with no repercussion. Also sounds like Etsy needs to “man up” and apologize to their users and remove the interview and ban her. They should feature YOU god damn it!