Etsy Used to Be Magic. Now It’s a Failing Mall.

There was a time when Etsy felt like magic.

It was the golden era of the handmade internet: the digital farmer’s market that honored the village markets of old, where artisans could finally make a living doing what they loved. Every listing felt personal. Every product had a story. You could scroll through the site or app, and find hundreds of items that were truly unique. It was once a space where the imagination was made tangible.

Now? It’s been reduced to feeling like walking through a dying mall.

Rows of algorithm-friendly listings blur together with AI-generated mock-ups, cheap drop-shipped knockoffs, and “handmade” goods mass-produced overseas. Etsy takes its increasingly predatory cut from the artists who built the platform, leaving these artisans gasping for air under fees, ads, and the corporate bloat of it all.

The heart of the handmade movement didn’t die because people stopped creating. It died because “hustle culture” and capitalism smothered the life from it.

The Myth of the Modern Maker

Somewhere between TikTok tutorials and “Quit Your 9–to-5” influencer money grabs, the handmade dream was hijacked by hustle culture.

Everyone is desperate to escape the grind. They crave the feeling of the villages of yesteryear where artists were valued and honored. And who can blame them? The economy is brutal, wages don’t keep up with rising rent, and corporate life drains the soul. But the solution people run toward, the “Start your own business” mantra, is just another trap.

Somewhere in the modern world, a new maker picks up a crochet hook, works up a few rows, and immediately thinks: How much can I sell this for? They jump onto Etsy, Instagram, Facebook Marketplace, make an account, and start pricing out time and materials. Inevitably, they miss the invisible cost:

Experience.

The reason a seasoned maker can finish the same project as the new maker in 45 minutes rather than 4 hours isn’t luck. It’s skill. It’s tension control. It’s years of practice, mistakes, and refinement. Somewhere along the line, “Professional” became defined as “Someone out there is willing to pay, even if I haven’t found them yet, and thus, I’m a professional artisan.”

This, of course, grows the tension within the maker’s market: New artists complaining about pricing being undercut, when the reality is, the experienced artist doesn’t need to charge for the additional hours. The new seller manages a sale, but the work makes common beginner mistakes, and suddenly, the buyers aren’t buying handmade for lack of trust. A new artist uses AI to create a pattern, not realizing that AI doesn’t understand crochet stitches, and sells it off, upsetting a whole range of artists who are now frustrated at the poor quality patterns.

New sellers aren’t understanding the value that comes with experience when they’re being sold the pipe dream of immediate success and self-sufficiency. They see the finished product and think, If they can do it, so can I. How hard could it be?

Except the market’s already full. And it’s not just full: it’s overflowing.

A Flooded Market of Sameness

Every few weeks, the handmade world crowns a new viral trend.

Hexi-cardis. 6 day star blankets. Chunky knit mushroom hats. Witch hats. Crocheted penises and vulvas.

The patterns explode all over social media. Makers rush in to make the newest viral patterns, flooding Etsy and other markets with these near-identical items; all underpriced, over-saturated, all competing for the same handful of buyers.

But here’s the problem:

These trends go viral because the makers love making them, not because non-makers are aching to buy them.

When the pattern takes over the internet, it’s not because customers are stumbling over themselves in anticipation of handing over their hard-earned cash. It’s other crocheters excited to start their own project. The demand never came from the public, it came from inside the community. That’s why you can scour through shop sites like Etsy and Tedooo and come across an oversaturation of the same items that aren’t selling.

Meanwhile, manufactured goods dominate the algorithm. Cheap, sweat-shop driven products are all over the TikTok shops and Link in my Bio! affiliate links. A customer can buy a $25 machine knit sweater from Amazon. Why would someone else who is fighting the economy just as makers are spend $250 on a handknit sweater?

The answer used to be quality and authenticity. Now, survival has taken over.

Who Are You Making For?

There’s another piece of the conversation that is conveniently left out of the Quit Your Corporate Life conversation: Who are you actually making for?

Every business starts with an ideal customer. The key demographic that you’re hunting for and marketing to. But when people are being told Just quit and dedicate yourself, it’s all about your drive and willingness to hustle, they’re being fed a half-truth.

It’s easy to say, “Don’t buy from soulless Walmart, buy handmade instead.”

It’s easy to say, “Pay me what I’m worth!”

The real truth of the matter is that the people who generally would prefer to buy handmade are in the same basket as us: they’re living paycheque to paycheque. They’re battling the same economy. They understand the value of the craft, but they often can’t afford the sticker price. Of course, they’re going to buy the department store model. Undercutting the price may make it more accessible to these potential buyers, but now the maker is outright losing money.

And the people who can afford it? The ones with disposable income and luxury budgets? They’re rarely browsing Etsy. They’re buying name brands, designer collabs, or commissioning bespoke pieces from established artists who have become successful enough to market themselves as “Status.”

This leaves the handmade market in a weird vacuum where everyone is making, everyone is selling, and no one other than other makers are really buying. It’s a self-contained economy of makers all trying to sell to other makers who are also broke. We join groups and communities thinking we can reach our target audience, only to discover that it’s just full of other sellers hoping that you are their prospective buyer.

That’s not sustainable. It’s tragic.

The Side Hustle Disease

Within maker culture, there is a longing for simpler times. We imagine the village markets where you might trade a warm sweater for the upcoming winter to get a chicken or two, maybe some vegetables from the local farmer. It’s romanticized, the small village where teh craftperson had their niche, and they were guaranteed to sell their wares, the blacksmith, the weaver, the potter.

But what we miss is that handmade wasn’t luxury; it was a necessity. People bought from local makers because it was the only option.

This leads to the cultural infection that we can’t shake.

The side hustle.

You like to knit? “You should sell those.”

You bake really good cookies? “You should start a microbakery.”

You made a good candle as a gift once? “Girl, why haven’t you opened an Etsy shop?”

It’s constant. This relentless demand to monetize every spark of creativity and joy.

As if every passion must become productive.

As if joy is invalid unless it pays the bills.

When you turn your hobby into your job, you risk killing the very love that you had in the first place. On top of that, when we look at cities with steadily climbing unemployment rates, with jobs going unfilled, we need to remember that society needs more than just artisans. I won’t say that the job market is in a healthy state either; we all know the hellscape of applying for jobs that you know that will likely never go to the average person.

The Illusion of the Handmade Empire

There’s another uncomfortable truth that we don’t like to admit: the modern maker movement has started to look an awful lot like an MLM.

Everywhere you scroll, there is someone saying “Start your own business! Quit the rat race! Live your dream!”, usually over a reel of neatly labelled jars, pastel lighting, a full stock of knit or crocheted goods lined up in the closet space, and curated chaos. The pitch is hardly different from the “Join my downline” mantra. Only now, it’s “Open your own Etsy shop, livestream your process for gifts!”

Sure, we can all go ahead and become makers, but we won’t replicate the “It Girl” success stories of the 2002 internet maker era. The market is flooded 10,000 times over. The beautiful stories of the maker who beat cancer and decided to live for joy and got successful selling hand-dyed yarns are that; beautiful, but a relic of an internet long lost.

Back then, Etsy was new. eBay had breathing room. Algorithms didn’t bury creators under ads and sponsored partnerships. If you were talented and lucky, you could be discovered. Now, the competition is in the millions.

These days, the life of a maker isn’t simply making. It’s being the maker, the photographer, the marketer, the videographer, the editor, the copywriter, the social media influencer. You need to be equipped with knowledge on SEO, brand strategy, analytics, trend timing, and the dark arts of the algorithm… and you might sell a couple things. Maybe.

You can’t AI your way into authenticity.

You can’t automate your soul.

No matter how much content you create and post, the algorithm doesn’t care about the passion in your heart. It’s about engagement. This isn’t a reasonable ecosystem for artists. It’s a hamster wheel.

The Maker’s Manifesto

Let’s be honest: The system is not built for makers anymore.

It’s built for algorithms, influencers, and corporations pretending to be small businesses. It’s built for the artist with disposable income who is willing to dump hundreds into boosting posts.

So maybe it’s time to stop trying to “win” at a rigged game.

You don’t owe the algorithm your art.

You don’t owe the economy your joy.

You owe yourself the freedom of making something real, without asking what it’s worth, without wondering if it’ll sell, without performing your process for clicks and views.

We’re not hobbyists, we’re not hustlers, and we’re not brand identities.

We are makers.

And I miss the world where that was enough.