Etsy + Tent London
Bringing an online experience into the real world
If you’ve never been to an Etsy office, you might imagine us as swaths of engineers, coders, and product designers — teams of people working exclusively in a digital context. Or perhaps you envision a giant office of crocheters, knitters, screen-printers and makers of all kinds. For a decent portion of the company, both of these perceptions hold relatively true. But a few of us devote a large percentage of our time to thinking about and designing for Etsy in the real world — the physical, tangible, and inhabitable manifestation of a global online marketplace made of creative people expressing themselves.
I work on the Brand Design team — we champion Etsy by creating hard-working, memorable ideas and making beautiful things that also further Etsy’s vision. We develop a huge array of visual and written content, including websites, film, printed materials, tote bags, product names, and beyond. A big part of my role is designing in-person projects — or, as we like to call it: “Etsy In Real Life” (IRL). This encompasses a vast range of project types, including partnerships with retailers, Etsy Wholesale events, self-initiated pop-up marketplaces, small-scale exhibits, and physical projects we haven’t even dreamed of yet.
Last September we had the opportunity to bring our marketplace to life at Tent London, a 4-day event during the London Design Fair where local makers and designers exhibit their work. We took over a 40 square meter (430 square foot) space within a repurposed former brewery in East London, and set up an exhibit to showcase the UK and Irish winners of the Etsy Awards, a juried competition which celebrates the best of creativity on Etsy.com.
The project team was very small: a program manager, a project manager / curator, an art director, and a designer. Together, we worked towards a focused goal: to highlight the winners of the awards while promoting Etsy’s brand message.
We began our process by familiarizing ourselves with the featured Etsy sellers and quickly resolved to design a showcase that respected and elevated the high quality of craftsmanship, originality, attention to detail, and creativity of each item. While the items themselves varied greatly in both intended audience and aesthetic, the quality of their making connected them as a group.
Not wanting to design in a vacuum, it also seemed logical to conceive of a design that would respond to the surrounding context: not only current design and maker culture in London, but also the physical characteristics of the Old Truman Brewery. And, as with every project, we deliberately kept Etsy’s values at the forefront of our approach, aiming for a high level of craftsmanship, authenticity, sustainability, and delight.
We brainstormed different conceptual approaches, eventually gravitating towards an emphasis on the diversity of Etsy’s sellers and their products. The items ranged from entirely handmade to manufactured, and employed a huge array of fabrication types, including hand-knitting, 3D-printing, woodworking, sewing, ceramics, and more. We loved the idea that an exhibition could feature such a disparate variety of objects and styles, with Etsy as the connecting thread that ties them all together. It began to feel like a microcosm of the universe of Etsy, which brings millions of different makers together under one umbrella — makers doing different things in different ways, with different materials, in different locations.
Most of our in-person projects include on-site commerce of some type, such as a craft market where visitors can shop from Etsy sellers in person, or an Etsy pop-up in a department store. But at Tent London none of the items would be available for purchase on site. With that in mind, we headed in an exhibition design direction, and worked towards creating an experience that felt like an Etsy gallery — clean, sparse, and focused, and putting the seller items at the forefront.
We also familiarized ourselves with the Tent London space as best as possible. The floor plans indicated the presence of two columns in our designated area — and while we were able to confirm the size of our footprint and the distance between the columns, we were told from the beginning that the final, exact placement of our booth would not be determined until the day of setup. We would have to design our display around two columns in an unknown location. While this was a large and (admittedly) difficult impediment, there was nothing we could do about it but embrace this as part of the design problem. We decided to use it to our advantage, and conceptualized a modifiable framework that could be reconfigured on site to accommodate for this gap in information. We created a loose model of the space, established a modular panel system, and tested out multiple layouts that could change depending on the potential placement of the columns.
After narrowing down the product assortment to a final collection, we sketched out rough elevations of each display panel to determine the placement and layout combinations of the seller items.
Susi Vetter, the designer on the project, is based in Berlin, and I’m based in Brooklyn. So we adopted a back-and-forth collaborative process, adding to and modifying each other’s drawings after-hours and sending updated sketches and notes across time zones (thank you, technology) until we felt like the design was in a good place. This process allowed us to settle on a final quantity of panels (that, again, could be rearranged as needed during set up), so our contractor could pre-fabricate as many of the components ahead of time.
When we arrived on-site the first morning of the installation, the columns were (as expected) in a location we hadn’t planned for. Our fabricator built a low floor to act as both a structural and visual anchor to the space, and as we set up the panels we worked off a rough base plan. We improvisationally rearranged the configuration to maximize spatial flow and circulation, while maintaining wide and welcoming entrances at either end. For designers who prefer to plan everything to the smallest detail, this was a very unorthodox process. It made our set-up much more time-consuming than usual, but because we had planned it this way stress was kept to a minimum and the final design of the structure looked and felt intentional.
As our design was intended to be a sort of elevated scaffolding, it made sense for us to use functional building materials that were largely unaltered. Essentially, the booth framework itself came to serve as a kind of physical metaphor for Etsy.com: a utilitarian structure that honored and amplified sellers, highlighted their products in the best light possible, and welcomed visitors to interact with the items up close.
Throughout the design process, we kept coming back to the concept of interior vs. exterior as the theoretical foundation of our booth. With the interior as a simple, product-focused gallery space, the exterior became our opportunity to celebrate Etsy. We wanted to highlight the brand, but not overpower the interior display. So we kept orange to a minimum, only using it on panels that also featured signage, and in small focused moments, such as the visible shelving hardware and orange neon tape on each item label.
Since we didn’t know the panel positions until we actually set them up, we produced a variety of Etsy-branded decals in orange and white, and waited until the booth construction and gallery layout were completed before application. We took a light touch to the printed graphic design components, sticking with clean and organized layouts and a minimum of signage and handouts.
Whenever we design an in-person project, there’s always a question about what to do with the physical components once it’s over. Historically, we’ve saved every part and attempted to reuse them in future projects, but the cost of storage quickly multiplies and there’s no guarantee that repurposing will be possible. So from the beginning of this project we decided to donate everything to a shared woodworking space in London, thereby giving back to the local maker community. Like most of our IRL projects, we employed the use of humble, everyday, off-the-shelf materials like plywood, pine 2x2s, falconboard, and standard hardware. Since these materials were left mostly raw, and cut to a few set lengths, they would be relatively easy for other fabricators to repurpose and integrate into their own projects.
One of the things I love most about working on this kind of project is that we’re able give the Etsy community a context to connect in the physical world. As we work on more and more IRL projects, we will continue to explore and discover new ways of creating analog experiences that feel authentic and consistent with Etsy.com — transforming our online marketplace into an in-person experience that you can touch, photograph, and inhabit.
Project Team
Emma Long, Program Manager
Kate Carmody, Project Manager + Curator
Jenny Kutnow, Creative Lead
Susi Vetter, Designer
Barny Rockford, Fabricator
Rachel Hudson and Luke Wolagiewicz, Photographers
