Etsy Says Sellers Can Now Use Factories for Their Homemade Goods

October 2, 2013 Leave a comment

Etsy Says Sellers Can Now Use Factories for Their Homemade Goods

Etsy Inc., an online marketplace for handmade and vintage goods, will let its sellers use outside manufacturers and hire as many employees as they need, loosening rules amid confusion over requirements. The change will allow sellers that cultivated their businesses on Etsy to keep expanding on the site, Chief Executive Officer Chad Dickerson said in an interview. It will also permit moves that were previously forbidden, like employing people in another location or producing goods in a factory. Etsy is home to about 1 million sellers, some of whom are struggling to keep up with demand for their products, the company said. Under the new policy, sellers will have to disclose their business relationships and apply to use manufacturing services. Etsy will try to ensure that goods sold on the site still meet its definition of “handmade.” “It’s no secret that our community has struggled for a long time with Etsy policies,” Dickerson said in an interview. “We realized that as the community grows, the policies that we created that frankly didn’t work well when the community was smaller were bursting at the seams.” Dickerson said the company hasn’t determined how the changes will affect the business, which is planning an eventual initial public offering. “We haven’t run a single spreadsheet on it from a revenue standpoint,” he said. “We haven’t done any financial projections.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Frier in New York at sfrier1@bloomberg.net

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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