You can't cut your way to healthy
Been there, been victimized by it, been sold out to a healthy company.
No T-shirt.
Arts and crafts market Etsy announced today that it is cutting more workers in an effort to get its finances back on track. The eBay for handicrafts says it will now be laying off about 22 per cent of its staff, or around 230 people, in what it is trying to present as an effort to "sharpen focus" on its core business. Etsy …
No, but you can shed a load of positions created in a burst of IPO cash optimism.
I like Etsy: you can find nice stuff on it at reasonable prices and I think it's significantly better experience than E-Bay for both buyer and seller. It's always going to be difficult to survive on the thin margins but I wish the company luck.
Just a sec...Etsy had 230 people doing marketing and admin, fully a quarter of their workforce?? What? I mean, come on, it's a peer-to-peer selling platform with a middleware slice. The tech is mature, there's no distribution chain, payments are handled by credit card and paypal processors, they have brand recognition amongst artisans, I mean, what else is there to do that requires 200 people?
I'd expect a domestic goliath like, say, Walmart or Target to have 200 marketers, and Etsy to have maybe ten.