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The attack might have petered out if not for Winchell, the blogger and Etsy critic. Winchell, it is fair to say, had become obsessed with Etsy. The daughter of a ventriloquist and herself a professional cartoon voice actor--her credits include King of the Hill and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse--Winchell started a game with her friends. Every time they had a dinner party, they'd buy something absurd on Etsy to take as a gift for the host. Before long, she had launched a blog dedicated to lampooning the kitschiest of Etsy's offerings. She called it Regretsy. It soon became a hub for disgruntled Etsians.
At this point, Schechter and Ecologica Malibu were still only suspected of faux craftsmanship in the first degree; Winchell decided to investigate and prosecute. She scoured the Internet and found Schechter's pieces listed on Overstock.com and seemingly identical pieces on a website called All from Boats, a wholesaler that specializes in Balinese furniture. Winchell posted screen shots of the listings alongside Schechter's Etsy listings. When Winchell discovered that the California dealer for All from Boats had the same address as Schechter's Ecologica business--suggesting that Schechter was merely distributing mass-produced furniture--traffic on Regretsy went through the roof. "The whole thing exploded, and people were furious," says Winchell. "I received thousands of comments and hundreds of e-mails and tweets by the minute. People felt like they were being heard."
Within days, angry Etsy members banded together on a website called Protesty to plan a boycott of the site. Six hundred sellers set up a Change.org petition decrying Etsy's support of mass producers, and Schechter says she was ambushed with hate e-mails and phone calls criticizing her business. Her husband, an attorney, issued a cease-and-desist notice to an angry Etsy follower. It was swiftly posted on Regretsy.
Dickerson, Etsy's CEO, waded in to announce his support for Schechter. In a statement posted on Etsy, he condemned the "mob mentality" of her critics and framed the situation as an oversight rather than deceit. "Ecologica Malibu is a collective shop, run on Etsy by Mariana with help from a local staff," an Etsy administrator wrote on the site. "In keeping with Etsy's rules, that collective should have been disclosed within the shop; this is now corrected." That only stiffened the dissidents' resolve: two weeks later, 4,000 sellers agreed to black out their shops for 24 hours in protest of Schechter's featured shop.
Within weeks, Schechter closed her Etsy shop. Fearing for her safety, she moved her brick-and-mortar store to a different location in Malibu. Schechter says she was designing the furniture, outsourcing the labor to reclaim wood to All from Boats and then assembling the imported pieces from Bali with four carpenters in Malibu. "I didn't fully understand the concept of Etsy when I opened my shop," Schechter says. "I never lied to anybody. My products are handmade. I don't think it's my place to sell next to a person selling soap out of their kitchen. The community is right about that. But I shouldn't have been demonized."