Welcome to the Branding 5 at 5 where I take 5 minutes (at 5am when this segment was recorded live on Instagram–yes, I like to torture myself by waking up at the crack of dawn) to dissect a big brand into digestible pieces to apply to your small business. Today’s unsuspecting brand is Etsy!

First, let’s learn a little background on Etsy:

• It was founded by three gentlemen back in 2005. One of which was a furniture maker, but was struggling finding buyers for his custom works.
• It was originally a yogurt company (but has since expanded its product line) founded by Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish immigrant.
• Chobani is closely related to the word “chopani,” which means “shepherd” in his native language. This is an homage to his childhood in Turkey growing up on a dairy farm! He has a really cool founder story (seriously–he bought an abandoned Kraft yogurt factory in the middle of nowhere New York when he started the business!!), but that is a story for another time.

Big Brand Ideas

Let’s dive into a few things specific to the Etsy brand.

Mission

Keep commerce human.

Etsy’s Mission

How simple. I love that this is easy to remember for every stakeholder, but especially Etsy leadership and employees. They revolve around a few different tenants:

• Powered by people
• Something special with a human touch
• For those moments in life that deserve imagination

Brand Color & Logos

Brand Color
Etsy has one brand color: orange. ONE color! Like the gutsiness of this is freaking confident, and I love it. Color psychology is one of my favorite things ever (yes, I am a nerd). Orange brings the energy of red, while maintaining the happiness of yellow. Generally speaking, brands with the color orange are usually confident and optimistic, which accurately describes Etsy, for sure!

Think of a few other brands that incorporate orange as one of their main brand colors: Dunkin, Amazon, and ESC. All very confident and play off the positive vibes that the color evokes.

Brand Logo
Their logo is simple–the name of the company in a serif font.

Even more simple, their icon: just an “E”! Taking their one letter in their one color and making it their own, a globally recognized brand.

If that doesn’t scream confident, I don’t know what does! The only other brands that I can think of with just a letter “e” is like old school Internet Explorer and maybe eBay, but of which are lowercase, whereas Etsy’s icon is a capital E.

Overall
I couldn’t find any specific research to support this analysis, but to me–a simple brand color scheme and a simple logo says one thing–Etsy does not want to overshadow the makers that they bring to their marketplace. They intentionally stay simple, so that the focus can be put on the handmade products created by humans.

Serving Two Audience Segments

Etsy is serving two audience segments: Sellers/Makers and Buyers/Consumers. Etsy basically faced with serving two clientele; each cannot survive/thrive without the other.

Sellers/Makers

Etsy makes the barrier to entry low—it costs only 20 cents to create your first listing on Etsy, which is really attractive to makers who want to focus on making their product and not have a ton of overhead, like a storefront, for example.

Etsy Teams for sellers to create community, either through coming together within their own niche or to meet in-person in the same geographical area

Etsy Forum meant to be a place to troubleshoot any issues and share stories to learn and further create community! In addition to this being a great community area for makers, it is also beneficial to Etsy as a company. This “forum” is naturally rich with SEO-keywords, which pushes Etsy up in search engine results…win/win!

Buyers/Consumers

Etsy has easy browsing capabilities for buyers to make it as easy as possible for a potential buyer to find the item he/she is looking for and make it as easy as possible for that buyer to say YES to purchasing from a maker. Essentially a portion of the company is a tech company…which I have no doubt the founders anticipated.

The “Etsy Journal,” which is their blog, is meant to look like a scrapbook (human connection) and is categorized and written not only to serve the consumer, but also to showcase various shops, which is beneficial to both their audience segments.

Finally, I want to touch on their social media presence. This is segmented as well. “Etsy” accounts are for buyers/consumers, whereas “Etsy Success” accounts (specifically on Instagram and YouTube) are for sellers/makers. They make tailored content to each platform to best serve the specific audience they are speaking to, specifically in the format that is best for each platform. This is an incredibly time-consuming task, but they are committed to this to make the experience for both makers and buyers as easy and fulfilling as possible.

Tangible Takeaways

So now to take all these big brand ideas and apply them to your own small business…let’s see how that’s possible!

1. People like to buy from humans. While some brands shy away from sharing the “face” of the business, whether that is the owner, the founder, the employees….whichever HUMAN, I think it’s important to see that there are indeed humans behind the scenes to deliver that service/product. One quick way you can show your human-ness as a small business is update your profile picture to your FACE! If you’re attached to your logo, no problem, just overlay it on the image of YOU.
2. Color psychology is subtle, but important! And here is why: Humans remember how certain people, products, situations make them FEEL and color psychology evokes an emotion. You can prime a potential customer/client on how your product/service is going to make them feel before they even interact with the product/service provider.
3. It IS possible to serve two segmented audiences, as long as the values still remain the same. This is something I struggle with on the daily! So it was reassuring to see that a bigger brand can do this and stay in alignment with their mission and goals.

Let Etsy be your inspiration!

Now I’m not sure what you’re waiting on, but you should get there and grow!