Pruning "Friday Finds" and Handmade Kokoba

I love to support fellow Etsy artisans. Whenever I find a shop I really love, you can bet it'll end up as a Friday Find sooner or later.

 But it would be naive to think that every shop on Etsy is a small, indie-operated business with just one or a handful of people. Etsy is a huge marketplace with international name recognition and there are resellers and wholesalers out there looking to bank on that name recognition to appeal to a broader audience. Etsy, of course, makes bank off of this. A small business can't list thousands of unique items at a go or handle 13,100 sales over the course of a few years—not when it's selling handmade clothing or jewelry, at any rate. But since their presence on the site benefits Etsy ($0.20 for every listing and a percentage of every sale?), they're not going away. A few, here and there, so that Etsy's reputation as a "handmade" marketplace isn't entirely laughable, but not the bulk of them. Never.

This is to say that a couple of shops that I've found and featured on Friday Finds I have, after some more detailed research (which I should have done in the beginning), decided to recant on.

I've deleted those posts from the blog and have submitted search removal requests for the URLs and search results to Google. Additionally, I will be more vigilant in future Friday Finds.

I also want to reiterate that all of the jewelry at Kokoba is handmade by me. Alone. Myself. Lawyer Mom handles most of the packaging and mailing (except the custom orders; I take care of those from bead box to post office, as it were), but I make everything. I buy my beads in small batches and, out of probably hundreds of pieces, have yet to create any identical pieces. Kokoba is not on the track to becoming mass-manufactured (well, unless I decide I want to sell some place like ThinkGeek or the IFuckingLoveScience store on my idea for a cash lump sum, but then you loyal readers would be the first to know after the ink was dry on the contracts) and you can rest assured that there is literally nothing else like a piece of Kokoba jewelry anywhere in the world.

And you can rest assured that, from now on, the Friday Finds will be better. They will be unique, indie, and handmade.