How Etsy Became the Go-To Destination for Cloth Face Masks
When Covid-19 hit, the marketplace had already been making foundational enhancements to search for three years
Life is all about playing the hand you’re dealt. Covid-19 dealt a lot of shitty hands. Yet Etsy came out of the worst of the pandemic holding a royal flush. CEO Josh Silverman referred to 2020 as “a time when opportunity met preparedness.” A look at how Etsy became a go-to destination for cloth face masks.
Etsy’s Dunkirk
Before it was a movie, Dunkirk was an existential moment for the Allies during World War II. Surrounded on three sides by the German army, harassed from above by the Luftwaffe, and backed against the English Channel, the prognosis was grim for the Allied troops trapped in the French port city of Dunkirk. Miraculously, over an eleven day period, the Royal Navy and a hodgepodge flotilla of civilian yachts, tugboats, trawlers, and pleasure craft evacuated over 330,000 Allied soldiers from the German vice grip. The evacuation of Dunkirk was one of the turning points of the war.
To Etsy CEO Josh Silverman, the Covid-19 pandemic was Etsy’s Dunkirk moment, a pivotal time when the company and its sellers rose to the occasion amid challenging circumstances.
Masking Up
On April 3, 2020, the CDC updated its mask guidelines, recommending that Americans wear fabric face masks. The following weekend, buyers searched Etsy for face masks two million times, or nine times per second. Additionally, “face mask” was the most searched term during the two weeks ending April 7, 2020 (true to form, searches for bar carts and sourdough starter kits also spiked). Etsy management likened this to Cyber Monday, except everyone was looking for the same product, and that product was in short supply.
A surge in demand is only beneficial if you can fulfill it. Etsy had a problem: searches were returning Halloween masks and face creams. Customers couldn’t buy something they couldn’t find. Serving irrelevant search results is a…
