Etsy Says Customers Want More Items From Black Sellers

The protests against police brutality and systemic racism seen in cities around the globe this year where they've reignited calls to buy black as a corrective issue in some ways to the economic inequalities many black entrepreneurs face

Blueberry scallop foo is here with more scarlet thanks caroline in today's bloomberg equality our ongoing conversation about the bottom line impact of diversity i spoke with josh silverman ceo of etsy as part of our

Monthly cornell tech at bloomberg speaker series i asked josh about the e-commerce platform's collection of black-owned shops that's featured prominently on its website as an editor's pick

Here's what josh told me we had a lot of demand from buyers who wanted to support black sellers and fortunately we already had from black history month a curated set of items that we could put

Forth we could very quickly get and put out so that buyers had a place to go and i'm happy to report that that's actually been the most popular curated collection we have all

Kinds of curated collections on etsy for all kinds of things but the the the highlighted black owned shops that we ran uh over those important few weeks um actually the best selling curated

Collection we've had and what that means is there's a lot of buyers out there that really have been looking to support specifically support black sellers and and we're happy that we we were able to to rise to that moment

How do you sellers to make sure that there are no bad actors jumping on the bandwagon no one trying to game the system get in on this feature this curated off that you have

Yeah another great question you know we thought really hard about that and we don't ask sellers to identify themselves we don't ask for their race and there's a lot of reasons why we don't want to ask for their race

And we don't want to be the arbiter of who's part of what community that puts us in a very inappropriate position so we thought hard about how are we going to deal with that

And and and that's where embracing community-led solutions has really helped so etsy has this concept of teams any seller can raise his or her hand and create a team and that can team can

Be about anything they want you know people who make ceramics or sellers in portland oregon or you know kind of whatever you want and we will provide them some tools for them to build community

So what we did is we supported some communities for black-owned teams and those teams can self-organize and self-police about membership within their community