Sometimes I fantasize about having a little side business helping people plan ecofrugal weddings. I wouldn't be like a normal wedding planner, who makes all the arrangements from start to finish and charges a grand or two for the service; instead I'd let couples hire me by the hour to do exactly as much of the work, or as little, as they wanted taken off their hands. And I'd use the techniques I learned planning my own wedding, and all the tricks I've learned in the years since, to help them have the wedding of their dreams on a budget they could live with in real life.
Since one particular item that takes a big bite out of many wedding budgets is the dress, I'd want to have one of my services be helping brides-to-be (or anyone who wants a dress without the gendered label to go with it) find affordable alternatives. When I got married 19 years ago, I wore a Renaissance-style bodice I bought on eBay for about $35 and a skirt Brian's mom made for me with about $25 worth of fabric. But that was before Etsy existed, so I've always assumed that if I were trying to recreate the same look now, that would be the best place to look.
Recently, out of curiosity, I decided to check the site and see what kind of options it would offer these days for a bride who wanted the same kind of fantasy-woodland-Renaissance vibe I was going for in my dress. I'd done similar searches a couple of times in the past, and I'd found lots of interesting choices in a wide range of prices. But this time, that wasn't what happened at all. I did a whole series of searches on different terms like "white Renaissance dress," "white fairy dress," "white corset dress," and so on (specifically avoiding the word "wedding," since adding that to the front of any phrase usually adds an extra zero to the end of the price tag). And instead of seeing lots of unique designs by individual artisans, I kept seeing the same few listings over and over under different sellers' names. More frustrating still, no matter how carefully I tried to craft my search terms, most of the dresses Etsy kept showing me looked nothing like what I was describing. I knew there used to be lots of sellers on this site who had the kind of things I was looking for, so where had they all gone?
When I asked Google, "What happened to Etsy?" I discovered that this was not just my imagination. There were tons of Reddit threads discussing the problem, and the consensus was that the site had been taken over by "drop shippers" buying and reselling cheap manufactured goods from China. This flood of cheap stuff had completely drowned out the independent sellers who remained, making it impossible to find their wares. And since the site was also making no effort to make sure item descriptions were accurate, these resellers could slap as many popular labels as they wanted onto their products, so that even a search as specific as "white renaissance fairy dress corset top handkerchief hem" would turn up almost nothing that fit all those descriptors and many things that fit none of them. (Cory Doctorow argues in an essay that this same process, which he calls by a whimsical if rather rude name, is inexorably happening all over the Internet.)
But that still didn't entirely answer my question. It explained why I couldn't find the good stuff on Etsy anymore, but it didn't tell me where I could find it. Presumably, the home tailors who used to make these interesting garments were still out there somewhere. So were they still on Etsy, just buried in the search results? Or had they moved on?
To answer this question, I tried searching for "What is the new Etsy?" That turned out to be kind of dead end. There was a story that sounded promising about angry Etsy sellers creating a new platform called the Indie Sellers Guild, but when I checked that site out, it turned out to be more of an informal union for artisans than an actual platform for them to sell their wares. The site did have a directory of member shops, but it didn't provide any descriptions of what they provided. It might be useful for tracking down a specific creator you'd already heard of, but not for finding creators who sell a particular type of item. And a search for "Etsy alternatives" turned up mostly tools for artists to create their own stores, not marketplaces where you could search a whole bunch of those stores at once.
So I tried a different approach: I took the searches I'd been doing on Etsy and plugged them directly into Google. And this time, I started getting a few useful results. I had to get pretty specific with my search terms, but I started turning up thematically appropriate garments from a bunch of retailers I'd never heard of before, like Devil Inspired, Holy Clothing, Scarlet Darkness, Dolls Kill, and Rosegal. Most of these goods weren't handmade, but then, neither was my eBay bodice 19 years ago. The point is, these retailers had the specific styles I was looking for, and all of them had at least some pieces in those styles for under $100.
The bottom line: affordable dresses for unconventional weddings are still out there. It just takes a bit more work to find them. And the same probably goes true for any of the other fascinating finds Etsy used to offer up, from woodwork to jewelry.
Now, if anyone would like help finding an affordable venue or assembling a tiered cake, I happen to know a bit about those topics too. Reasonable hourly rates!
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