designswarm thoughts

This sounds like a great way to answer

Just to cheer me up… here’s some of the latest lovely things from Dopplr

Not that I’m known for being inflammatory but this is total bullshit. In short, our Topoware store was shut, because we weren’t craft enough it seems. No warning, no nothing, just a snappy email once the store had already been shutdown. What sort of customer service is this? If you sell on Etsy and don’t hand sew every single thing yourself, consider yourself warned. I certainly won’t be using them anymore. I’ve included their email and my reply for posterity.
———————
THEM

” Hi there!

This is Tim from Etsy Support. I’m getting in touch with information about what can be sold on Etsy, because it looks like the item featured in your shop might not fit within our selling guidelines.

Here is an outline of what can be sold on Etsy :

Handmade by You: Artists and crafters can sell things they have made. Some production assistance is allowed, but the person running the shop needs to have a large part in creating the items for sale.

Vintage Goods: These must be at least 20 years old. ‘Vintage Style’ items less than 20 years old can’t be sold.

Crafting Supplies: You can sell commercial products that are made for crafting. Things commonly used for crafting but not made for that purpose do not qualify.

Because your listing does not meet our selling criteria, the shop has been closed. Please get in touch if you’d like to sell items that fit into one of the categories above.

Let me know if you have any questions about this!
Thank you,

Tim

Etsy Support”

———————
US

“Hello Tim,

You find me and Karola extremely shocked of such a dramatic and unfair move on Etsy’s part. Firstly these criteria have never been presented to us as we set up the store several months ago now. Secondly, we have designed Topoware ourselves and invested in getting it manufactured (as it’s nearly impossible do get ceramics and tableware done yourself) in a small quantity of 50 pieces only and in the UK (instead of China like most) in the hope that this detail would be appreciated by the Etsy community. Clearly it isn’t.

I will be blogging about this as I find it a shameful customer service process for any web platform.  As a designer, will no longer recommend it to my friends and colleagues.

best regards,

A”

I don’t follow politics that closely, usually because I’m never quite sure which ones I should be following but I must admit I had hoped Hillary would win the DMC. They speak of the glass ceiling. I feel it every day as a woman at the head of a small technology company. “Where are the women in technology?” “Where are the women in banking”,”Where are the women in conferences” are some of the questions I’ve had to answer to in the past year. I used to brush them off, pretending they don’t affect me or my work, which is bs really. Of course they do. Unfortunately. I’ve had to correct on more than one occasion fellow designers/technologists who will say “female” instead of “women”. You’d think this was the dark ages sometimes.
Knowing what she must know about the common denominator in America, I thought Hillary was crazy and admired her for being determined and driven to go against the tide. And if I had been able to, I would have voted for her, because what the US needs now, after such a dark age in terms of leadership and foreign perception, really is a leader that will make them catch up with a modern Europe, a booming Asia and a developing and technologically-advanced Africa.

Next time maybe.

“When you look at the population as a whole, there is no way of describing the patterns. The problem with answering this question is that people normally are not tracked — but today we are tracked thanks to the phones we carry with us.”

Nature

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