Etsy and the £50 Scented Candle

Whilst browsing the realms of Etsy in order to find some bespoke candles, I was shocked to discover one of the candles on the site was listed for £50 (around $67 at the time of writing). I wondered why and so I clicked ahead. It was a candle, shaped like a Greek Statue, smelling of vanilla (apparently, though I know you can't smell things through a screen and an open candle smells lacklustre for those of us who know our candles) and perched on a piece of plastic. Yes, it looked quite pretty but apart from pouring candle wax into a mould and waiting for the whole thing to dry before cracking the mould off, I'm not sure what the candlemaker did to make it worth £50.

I shrugged and flicked over to Shein, yes I felt bad about it but I don't currently have £50 to spend on a candle made by someone I've never heard of (I'm careful to put that last clause in there because a few years' ago I did buy a candle for £80 made by Tom Ford and honestly, it smelt amazing and lasted practically forever). Whilst scrolling through Shein candles I was shocked to find the exact same candle, if not slightly bigger, listed for £5 on the site. That is a whole ten times cheaper than the Etsy version.

I didn't actually end up buying either of them because I was so concerned that the smell was going to be all gone and dried up by the time it got here (candles constantly exposed to the elements without a jar or lid tend to smell less scented). But it definitely made me think about a few things. These include:

1. who is stealing from who? - Are people buying from Shein and then selling the item on Etsy, making people believe they are 'handmade'? OR, are Shein basically stealing from Etsy's designers and making their own versions in factories?
2. is it better to know your candle was made by someone or is it better to have £45 more after the purchase of a candle for a lower price? People definitely shop around more nowadays and thus, will we witness the death of Etsy?
3. is there a problem with price-gouging on Etsy? - I have been making my own candles and none of them warrant a £50 price tag. There is definitely not that much work going into them

Let's take a look...

Part 1: Who is Stealing from Who?

From quick research you can find that both of them are stealing from each other, but whilst selling items on Shein that have been designed based on Etsy-seller items is something that is well-known, there is something that entirely violates Etsy's policies altogether. This is when an Etsy seller advertises something as handmade and it is not, whilst price-gouging the item on Etsy. Many people have noticed that these items are from Shein and Temu and have been on the two sites far longer than they appeared to be on Etsy. Whilst sketchy behaviour is expected from a Chinese website where you can buy nice earrings for less than a £1, Etsy is desperately trying to maintain a reputation that no longer exists.

The reputation that it once had as being a handmade shop has been filled with dodgy sellers, people who make subpar products and Chinese companies posing as niche UK and USA storefronts. You can often go to the 'about' page of these shops to find out more about them and thus observe the lack of information available on these so-called shops. Since Etsy set their bar so high without being able to observe what would happen in the future, their reputation crumbled around them. Everyone expects Shein and Temu to do dodgy stuff, they never claimed to have the moral highground. Etsy claimed it and now has to suffer.

Part 2: Shopping Around

It is clear that there is more 'shopping around' nowadays when it comes to basically everything. Even I do it. Whilst decorating my bedroom, I shopped around for some posters and found them for around a couple of quid altogether. This was great compared to the £30+ Etsy prices. The question is: is it better to buy the handmade one or the cheap version. Let's take a look using the example of the posters I put in my bedroom.

Each poster I bought was around £1 and it was from, you guessed it, Temu. On Etsy, similar (but not the same) posters, featuring books and in nice colours such as pink started at £25 for the kind of size and material I was looking for. After adjustments, the average price was around £30. Which means I would be able to buy and replace my Temu post 30 times for the price of the one from Etsy. But is it better quality?

The answer is also no. The Etsy reviews often state that the posters are flimsy and made of paper and card, whereas my Temu one is made from some sort of plastic. So the handmade one may be actually drawn by someone, but they are in fact, worse when it comes to putting them on the wall. So what are people paying for?

They're paying for someone's drawing. I'm sorry, I don't have £30 to spend on some middle class woman's mid-life crisis drawing on her scammy Etsy shop. I wish I did, I would probably give my money to actual people if I had enough money - but if this doesn't help you understand why Etsy isn't a realistic place to shop for things you actually need then I don't know what will. Though it might have nice stuff, Etsy is definitely out of its depths. With more people looking for cheaper items that are still good quality, Etsy will be the first to suffer

Part 3: Price-Gouging

We've already discussed this in detail but this is a slightly different point. There is a lot of price-gouging on Etsy in which people who own shops put up the prices to extortionate levels and that is usually because of how much of a cut Etsy itself takes from the money they earn. However, there is a great difference between having to pay the platform for using it and whilst charging your customers into the sun, complaining about the fact that people are going somewhere else and getting their stuff for cheap. People simply don't have the disposable income to spend on the 'handmade' couture anymore and yet, the Etsy crowd simply don't understand why their shops are being copied and cloned by the Chinese companies on Shein and Temu. Yes, it is deceitful and malicious - but it has a huge audience, and perhaps they need to start asking themselves why.

Price-gouging on Etsy can be seen best during a sale in particular shops. I have bought some tops from Etsy and usually wait until these sales since the original price of a £25 t-shirt will drop to around £5. This means that the shop can definitely afford to sell it for the lower price and simply choose not to. I can also almost guarantee that there are more sales during the 'sale period' in which the lower price is used. This means more money will be made this way, but of course - there are rumours that Etsy sellers purposefully try to shut out poor people as they don't want poorer folk wearing their brands- but that's a story for a different day and time.

Conclusion: Where Does That Leave Us?

For Etsy to complain about the fact people aren't using it, or Shein and Temu are stealing designs from the platform is a little rich since even if the latter thing didn't happen, they still wouldn't be able to compete. This is the result of our post-capitalist society in which people require things cheaply and conveniently - Etsy simply doesn't fit into that lifestyle.

The YouTuber Levi Hildebrand made a video in which he suggested that people would become tired of Shein and Temu, returning to markets and buying things in person. The problem with this is that most 'markets' nowadays are marked up rubbish from Shein and Temu and again, there is a pricing problem. I have seen it in myself. Even if it is better quality, I no longer want to pay £25 for a t-shirt that I can not only get for £5, or even better on Shein and Temu - for £2-3. This means a whole outfit can cost a much lower price, and I will have money left over to get more things I actually want.

Will people return to in-person buying? No, I don't think so. We all want to be the super-optimist because everyone watched some sort of Hollywood-churned-out slop dystopia movie and we all think we are the 'outlier' who notices everything. Here's the deal: you're not. You are a person, in a floating chair, in the movie Wall-E.

I'll go through that more in another article though.