Arts and Crafts Find New Life Online

Web sites are building communities—and businesses—on the growing do-it-yourself craze

By Heather Green

• View Slide Show

It's an overcast December afternoon, but the Pop Up Community Center in downtown Manhattan is buzzing. Spread along a white wooden table, a half-dozen people are ironing plastic bags together to create a fabric made of recycled material. Others are bent over sewing machines, turning the plastic into colorful tote bags, wallets, even pillows. Occasionally they turn for advice to Anda Lewis Corrie, who is leading this workshop on transforming old plastic bags into useful objects.

Just another community service project? Not quite. Corrie works in marketing for Etsy, an online marketplace where people sell their own handmade crafts. And this workshop is all about sharing the do-it-yourself (DIY) experience—an impulse that Etsy and a number of other companies, large and small, have converted into a sizable business. Etsy won't reveal its revenues but expects to turn a profit early next year on what it takes in from a 20 cents-per-item listing fee and the 3.5% commission on goods that merchants sell through the site. In 2007 those merchants sold 1.92 million items worth a total of $26.5 million, according to Etsy. The 2 1/2-year-old startup produces online videos, hosts virtual town halls, and runs workshops with the goal of persuading more folks to teach each other to create and sell crafts on Etsy. Since it's a sort of eBay (EBAY) for handmade crafts, the more people who sign up to sell their handiworks on the site, the better the company does. Says Corrie: "We want to help people make a living making things."

COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE

Although the craft craze is well-established, with sales hitting $31 billion in 2007, it's taking off with a vengeance online. Hubert Burda Media, Germany's 58-year-old sewing-magazine and pattern giant, relaunched its English-language BurdaStyle Web site in July to share sewing patterns that can be modified to make new designs by the site's visitors. Sebastopol (Calif.) publisher O'Reilly Media launched Make and Craft over the past three years; they're print and online how-to magazines that pluck examples from the intricate videos and design blueprints that readers submit online. At the site of British startup StyleShake, users design and work together online on their own cocktail dresses, which they can send to the company to have turned into clothing for them.

Many of these companies say they trace their lineage to the open-source technology movement formed in the '90s by computer programmers who wanted to create software anyone could build upon. Rather than one expert teaching people how to do something, the open-source movement underscored how groups of people could share expertise and build on that knowledge. Now this mindset is rapidly spreading. Says Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California: "There is this resurgence of interest in DIY and then the desire to bundle up pieces of information and share them in an open-source way."

For Burda, the timing couldn't be better. The company wants to create a virtual DIY community beyond Europe. It's the biggest pattern seller there, yet it claims less than 2% of the U.S. market. So while Burda doesn't profit from the patterns that are pulled from its Web site, it hopes word of mouth will boost sales of its other patterns in the U.S. Each week Burda publishes a different pattern online, for items such as wide-leg trousers or a pencil skirt with pleats. They appear as PDFs that visitors can copy to their computers or print out. Sewers can alter the patterns as they fancy, and there are no restrictions on selling finished clothing.

The BurdaStyle community gets into full open-source swing after each new pattern is posted. Members swap written tips and post photos in the digital forum and group blog on how to alter the designs. They even create detailed, step-by-step slide shows demonstrating how to change the collar on a jacket or turn pajamas into maternity wear. Relaunched five months ago, BurdaStyle has about 29,000 members and clocks 1.5 million page views a month.