Etsy

We dove into the world of Etsy. We shopped the competition, the boutiques, and retail — and set up our own Etsy storefront to learn by doing. We spoke with sellers, buyers, crafters, and entrepreneurs; with long-time employees and newbies; with the CEO and the front-desk greeter alike. We learned by doing, and by doing, learned.

One observation rose above the rest. There was so much care running throughout Etsy — expressed in a thousand micro-activities across the community — but it couldn't be funneled into the core business. The central challenge came into focus: how do you bring structure and definition to a community marketplace that's organic, beloved, and a little bit magic, without crushing the very thing that makes it special? And underneath that, a deeper truth about what Etsy was really fighting. The enemy wasn't a competitor. It was apathy — putting up with what's available instead of getting what you actually want. Etsy existed to awaken people from a global stylistic slumber.

"Our biggest enemy is apathy — putting up with what's available instead of getting what you want."

From that truth we built Etsy's positioning around a liberating idea: Etsy frees personal expression from the tyranny of the herd. Individuality is an essential part of being human — it's what makes friendships better, dinner parties more fun, and the whole world more vibrant. Etsy invites people to leap beyond the limits of the crowd: wear what you want, make your home feel like your home, create the things you want to make, work the way you want to work.

Crucially, we helped leadership see that brand isn't the property of the creative team — it's expressed through every part of the business. We worked with the leadership of each function to explore how they could live the brand, make coherent decisions, and act with confidence and alignment. We also drew the vital distinction between the marketplace brand (Etsy.com, in service of buyers and sellers) and the corporate brand — Etsy, Inc. as a force forever reimagining commerce and putting the creative entrepreneur at the center of the world, grounded in a simple human insight: business is personal, and very bad things happen when the "personal" is taken out of it.

"Business is personal. Humans are behind all the genuinely positive and creative things we love about business."

The brand gave Etsy something it had been missing: the confidence to be bold. It offered clear definition about who Etsy is, how it serves its customers, and its role in the world — replacing self-doubt with conviction, and enabling teams across the enterprise to make braver, more coherent decisions.

The thinking has proven durable. Today Etsy is a public company serving roughly 90 million active buyers and millions of active sellers, and its enduring mission — to keep commerce human in a world of increasingly commoditized, soulless manufacturing — carries the same DNA we helped Etsy articulate years earlier: the irreplaceable value of the individual, the maker, and genuine human connection over transaction. We're proud to have helped Etsy see its own magnitude early, and to name the human truth at the heart of everything it has become.

"Etsy is where people buy the things they love, from the people who make them."