Live From The Festival of Books - April 26, 2010 - Segment Three

Live From The Festival of Books – Betsy and Renee chat with April Winchell, author of Regretsy: Where DIY Meets WTF. Her book was inspired by the website Etsy, an eBay for handcrafters where people can knit, sew, make crafts and sell them online. The title, Regretsy, reflects the most regrettable handcrafts she has found (so far) while trawling around on the website. As April explains it, the questions she keeps in mind while searching for items are: a) who would buy it; b) who would make it; and c) what they were thinking when they made it? April says she has always had a passion for the strange, misguided, or anything that misses the mark in some way, be it acting, music, or movies. Before writing the book, one of the things April was known for was having one of the largest documented collections of bad music on the internet at www.aprilwinchell.com.

April notes that, originally, her book began as a website, which she still maintains today. After getting the name “Regretsy” from a comment her friend made in an e-mail discussing Etsy, she discovered that the domain was surprisingly available. She purchased the domain, and after leaving it untouched for a few months, came across a reminder in her inbox that the site was still up and waiting for her to work on it. On her site, April makes “snotty commentary and jokes,” as she calls them, about the “crap” people post on Etsy. But really, as April notes, she is just saying what people browsing the crafts are actually thinking. Her site went live on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009, and a friend asked if she could drop a link to the site on Buzzfeed. By Monday, Regretsy had 31 million hits, and the site would go on to be profiled by the Wall Street Journal twice in two weeks, and eventually listed in the top 5,000 websites in the United States. In the beginning, April says, she didn’t link to the sellers because she thought they would be embarrassed, but then she started hearing ‘link back to me’. Now, she says almost everything she links sells, and she even has galleries of pictures of people posing with the items they bought. Additionally, all of the money raised from items sold on the site goes to benefit various charities.

For April, laughter is important and a lot of the people she hears from are suffering during these difficult times and find laughing at the items on her site to be a release. Etsy is very successful, and April thinks that if you make the atheistic they promote, then you’ll do very well there. However, if you create something unusual or off the beaten path, she doesn’t think people will find you. And in her opinion, those are the people that pay their listing fees and really support the infrastructure of the website, but don’t get promoted or listed on the front page or in gift guides. So in a strange way, Regretsy is able to provide those individuals with a somewhat unconventional platform to promote themselves. April says she is always receiving craft submissions and welcomes anyone who wants to submit their work to do so by going to www.regretsy.com.

2Minutes&More with Betsy Berkhemer and Renee Fraser airs every Sunday at 1pm on KFWB NEWS TALK 980. Tune in for a full hour of tips for business success.