BUSINESS/COMMUNITY
When the marketplace platform Etsy announced it would raise the transaction fee it takes from each sale from 5% to 6.5% in 2022, some 14,000 Etsy sellers closed their shops and went on strike for eight days. During that time, they began discussing what a better digital marketplace could look like. They imagined a platform where makers could own the marketplace, and where handmade items could be verified so buyers could know whether they were buying something authentic or a rip-off of someone else’s creative work.
The upshot of those discussions resulted in the beta launch of the Artisans Cooperative, a member- and supporter-owned co-op marketplace for handmade wares in October 2023. Today, the cooperative has several hundred members and supporters.
The co-op uses a points system for ownership buy-in. Members can take a traditional cash equity route for makers of a US$1,000 contribution that can start with as little as US$10 down. For supporters, it’s a US$100 buy-in also with US$10 down.
But money isn’t the only way in. Selling or buying on the platform uses a points system where one point equals US$1. Committing time on a team that helps run the cooperative is another way in.
Now in its second beta phase, it’s focusing on member feedback and honing the site to best suit member-seller needs while developing an internal structure to house that cooperative work. This kind of iterative, try-then-refine-as-you-go approach has been key to the co-op’s establishment and success, which has relied on support from a variety of sources, from other cooperatives to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“The first thing it took was a sense of unity,” says Mastress Tara, a board director and team service co-lead. “There were a lot of decisions to be made and a lot of different pathways we could take, so understanding where we were unified and what was really important to all of us was primary to be able to get anywhere.”
The group became a member of the Start.coop incubator, which works to scale cooperatively-owned businesses and provides US$10,000 in seed money to help cover the costs of incorporation. It was also helped by grant funding from the USDA’s Rural Cooperative Development Grant program; according to a 2015 Etsy demographics report, 39% of US Etsy sellers were rural, as compared to 21% of the general population. Through the US Federation of Worker Cooperative that facilitated the program, the USDA funding helped the Artisans Cooperative set up its governance structure and craft its business plan.
“We’ve had the capacity to develop our internal processes and really identify what the next level of scaling is,” Tara says. “For us, that means making the marketplace more functional and being able to have all the features necessary for you to run your business on there if you want to use it exclusively as your platform of sale.”
While the Artisans Cooperative has turned an idea into reality and is growing in the direction they’d like, Tara is candid about how difficult it is setting up a co-op and working cooperatively day in, day out. However, that’s to be expected, argues Andrew Delmonte, executive director of Cooperation Buffalo, a nonprofit helping fund and create co-ops in western New York state.
“The thing we really spend a lot of time on with folks is how to work together, how to make decisions together, how to navigate the implicit power versus the explicit power that might show up,” Delmonte says. “The realism of this is that it’s not easy because everything else in our lives is structured in a certain way.” That is, top-down.
Delmonte is excited by the kind of mixed-ownership model the Artisans Cooperative is using. “We’re seeing this emergence very recently of more of these multi-stakeholder models of cooperative where there are several kinds of owners all participating collectively in the ownership, the decision-making, and the wealth building. It’s a kind of new frontier in some ways. At the heart of it, it’s just how we want to organise ourselves to do the things we need to do for each other, for ourselves. When we take that back, we realise, oh, we could own these businesses, we could make these decisions about what hours we work because it’s just us managing our lives,” he says.
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