This lovely wedding dress was featured in a Glamour magazine spread about handmade wedding dresses you can buy on Etsy. Great news, right? Bring more traffic to Etsy! Support handmade!
Right. Except, you'll notice that the dress is no longer in the Glamour spread. Why? Because the dress is actually from Alibaba and is being resold on Etsy as handmade.
I don't want to address resellers here, as a habit, but this is a big deal. Etsy lost credibility with a major publication that was providing free adverstising for the entire site. I doubt that Glamour will feature Etsy again.
Glamour magazine is published by Conde Nast Publications, a corporation that also publishes Vogue, GQ, House and Garden, Brides, Bon Appetit and Vanity Fair, in addition to many other popular magazines. Not a good corporation to lose credibility with.
That was an inevitability Etsy should have forseen when they were mucking about censoring the forums and opting people in to have their e-mail pillaged instead of addressing issues that actually pertain to the business of selling handmade.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read about this yesterday the first thing I thought of was the post in the forums about a week ago from someone who said she submited some of her work to several fashion magazines and the magazines basically laughed at her and said Etsy wasn't a reputable venue. This crap right here is why other businesses don't take Etsy seriously!! Glamour magazine featured Etsy shops and because Etsy doesn't do anything about resellers, Glamour ends up looking bad. How many other magazines are going to run that risk now? I bet Glamour won't do it again!
ReplyDeleteIf Etsy were a reputable venue then Glamour wouldn't even have to go digging around to research on whether or not the items were really handmade - Etsy wouldn't be allowing resellers in the first place.
And with a bit of luck, Glamour is part of a group of magazines all from the same publishing house, that now all know that Etsy is the best place to look for resellers. Great stuff.
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