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Weeks before Marc Jacobs’s spring show, an assistant on hairstylist Guido Palau’s team found Jena Counts via an Internet search for candy-colored dreadlocks—a crucial (and ultimately controversial) accompaniment to Jacobs’s rave-inspired collection. A soft-spoken grandmother from Palatka, Florida, Counts had turned an idle-hands hobby of boiling, spinning, and custom-dyeing wool hair extensions into a homegrown business, and after tinting samples in every shade of the psychedelic rainbow, she got a ticket to New York—and a jaw-dropping commission of 12,500 pieces from Jacobs. “You couldn’t even walk in my living room! We had them stacked everywhere,” Counts recalls of the whirlwind production process. By the time she and her two daughters arrived backstage at the Hammerstein Ballroom last September to see their work looped into topknots on Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner, Dreadlocks by Jena—her online store at the virtual makers’ fair known as Etsy—had been catapulted onto the world stage.
This kind of improbable matchmaking lies at the core of Etsy’s DNA. Founded by three enterprising 20-somethings in a Brooklyn apartment in 2005, the website set out to connect self-starting DIYers with those seeking to bypass marketplace monotony. Since then, the platform has swelled into a global network of 1.7 million active sellers specializing in everything from ironic enamel pins to vintage Esprit jumpers and hand-hewn furniture.
That the site has quietly emerged as a booming beauty resource is hardly surprising, given the industry’s recent shift toward all things natural, small-batch, and one-of-a-kind. That’s what keeps the French makeup artist and nascent YouTube star Violette coming back for more. “I love it—it’s like another jungle,” she says of her deep dives into the site, where she’s found every permutation of glitter by way of Vancouver’s decopop. “Now that everything is so big and so branded and so marketed,” Violette says, “I think people really love to support small companies.”
That includes the niche Berkeley, California–based Call of the Vialed, Lauren Blevins’s popular collection of hand-blended natural perfumes, which she bottles in futuristic, refillable glass roll-ons. For Blevins, who launched a year ago on Etsy, the platform provided an easy jumping-off point (there’s a 20-cent fee for each item listed, plus a 3.5 percent cut of sales) and a first portal to the retail world via the chicly eclectic online boutique Kindred Black, which promptly picked up her line. It also proved to be an indispensable support system. “A maker’s main advantage is her adaptability,” she explains, pointing out that Etsy helps enable that agility with “no-M.B.A.-required metrics” and “instant customer feedback.”
And then there’s its reputation as a source for undiscovered gems, which has made the cyber bazaar a breeding ground for viral sensations. Last April, when Jenna Georgescu, a former CVS employee with a passion for customizing her own makeup, released the rainbow-effect Prism highlighter she alchemized in her Orlando kitchen, the initial run of 250 disappeared from her Etsy store, Bitter Lace Beauty, by nightfall. A tidal wave of media coverage followed the next day, and a second run of 500 illuminating powders was gone in less than twelve minutes.
After months spent completing orders for a 5,000-strong Prism waiting list, the 31-year-old is now gearing up to restock her entire 22-piece range, which includes unusual single-color highlighters in purple and teal as well as a confetti-inspired shade—an achievement that has garnered her inquiries from Sephora, the reality show Shark Tank, and a handful of large-scale manufacturers. But for now Georgescu plans to lean on Etsy’s infrastructure, which recently expanded to include Etsy Wholesale, a two-year-old application-based initiative that pairs growing makers and like-minded boutiques. “The funny thing is,” she recalls, “when I first started I was so scared: Is my stuff good enough to go on Etsy?”
For this story, the Vogue beauty editors combed through thousands of Etsy entries and tested an edited selection of products to arrive at these twelve brands, all launched on the makers’ site. But the opportunity for discovery is great—who knows what a deep-dive search will turn up?
