Everything Etsy turns crafts into communities

On a creative whim, stay-at-home mom Kim Layton made a felt pin in the shape of a cupcake with a smiley face.

From that beginning, like hundreds of thousands of others, Layton started a business selling on the DIY crafts site Etsy, which saw $314 million in sales last year.

But Layton has taken things a step further by building two online communities, Everything Etsy and Etsypreneur, for sellers like her.

Layton decided to put that first cupcake pin on eBay to see what happened. It sold.

“I thought wow, that was a fun,” said Layton, a 30-something mother of two. “I can’t believe I sold that. I thought I’d make a few more.”

She did.  By then she’d run across Etsy and found a universe filled with art and artists of every imaginable stripe, including more moms like her. She put the pins up for sale there. They did OK.

Things really took off when she turned them into hairclips. Having two sons, whom she homeschools, and no daughters, she hadn’t thought of hairclips until she noticed that they were big items on Etsy.

“They started selling like crazy,” she said. Pretty soon she had made and sold more than 200 items. She hadn’t planned on it but by Christmas she had enough to buy all her Christmas presents.

She might have stopped there. But Layton decided to ramp it up to the next step.

She launched a blog to promote her site. Today that blog, Everything Etsy, has become a community hub where artists share tips and help each other with their Etsy shops. About 2,000 people participate.

In addition, she also has Etsypreneur with nearly 1,400 members. Her Facebook page has nearly 10,000 followers and she has more than 12,000 Twitter followers.

All her platforms are geared toward “positive, uplifting Etsy sellers,” said Layton. That’s in contrast to people who highlight the woes of Etsy sellers, like Etsy Bitch, or point out some of the site’s more questionable merchandise, like Regretsy.

Everything Etsy greets you with colorful logos, hand-drawn art, and photos. Austere  and hipster it is not. It reminds one of Florida, where Layton lives with her husband (who runs the site with her) and kids.

She never intended to be a full-time Etsy seller or promoter, but these days she estimates she spends about eight to ten hours a day on the computer – with about 60 percent of her time spent on blogging and 40 percent spent on selling.

Layton is bullish on Etsy.

“For tons of moms across the country, Etsy is something that can help them, whether they’re just trying to eat” or want to make some extra cash, she said. “It can be what helps a family pay the rent. They don’t even have to leave the house. They’re onto something and I don’t think it’s going to go away. It’s going to continue to grow.”