Wie letzte Woche
angekündigt, nehme ich Euch heute mit in den hohen Norden Europas, genauer gesagt nach Norwegen, das seit knapp vier Monaten seinen ersten und eigenen Marktplatz für Hand- und Selbergemachtes hat:
Epla. Das Interview mit Siw Boine zeigt, wieviel Herzblut in
handmade stecken kann: dreizehn Fragen hat sie mir dreizehnmal mit ungebremster Begeisterung beantwortet. Dabei herausgekommen ist nicht nur eines der bislang längsten
handmade.Interviews, sondern auch eines, das Euch mitreissen wird. Auf geht's!
h2.0: Tell us a bit about yourselves: What is your personal affiliation to "handmade"? And what is your (professional) background?
Siw: Four people started Epla: Siw, Torunn, Morten and Rakel.
Torunn is the brain behind the design and the functionality of Epla. She has been working as a web‐designer for several years, and has an exeptional knowledge of designing, developing and programming, and how to make every bit of the site user friendly. She loves and collects art and has been buying
handmade for years.
Siw is a Product Designer and former teacher of Arts and Crafts. She loves making things; whether it is interior objects, clothes or jewellery; if she can knit it, sow it, nail it or glue it together herself, she does it.
Rakel has worked in marketing and project management for several years. She has a special interest in women entrepreneurship, and has started several businesses herself. She has an extensive network within the Norwegian art and design scene and is not afraid to use it.
Morten started his own successful business within IT a few years ago, and after selling it, he was looking for new projects. He immediately loved the idea of Epla, his interest in
handmade growing as Epla started taking shape.
Siw Boine and her home office
h2.0: Crafting and making things by hand does have a tradition of long standing in Germany; more, perhaps, than in the USA. What about Norway?
Siw: Norway's crafting tradition dates at least several hundred years back. Handmade, rosepainted furniture from centuries ago are now sought-after antiques. Our national dress, the
bunad has been and still is being handmade by crafters all over the country. Everybody has a grandmother who knits, a father who carves wood, an aunt who is into felting or a mother with a loom in the basement. These traditions have seen a large increase in interest the last few years, and a lot of young people are taking back their culture and their heritage by using these old techniques to make new and exiting designs. Old patterns are finding their way back to the fashion scene, and even kids in school want to learn how to crochet their own headband.
Torunn Grønbeck and her home office
h2.0: What was your motivation to build the marketplace, and how many people work at Epla?
Siw: At the moment only Siw works at Epla, but all four of us have areas of expertise that we use to make Epla better all the time. Siw is the general manager and ’caretaker’ of Epla, while Torunn, in cooperation with our programmers Funkbit, is constantly working on improving Epla's design, architcture and user interface.
The motivation to build Epla was first and foremost
to create a place to exhibit all the wonderfull things that are made in Noway. The question we asked ourselves was: We know that a lot of great things are handmade in Norway, but how can we find it or buy it? We wanted to be both a place to try and sell what you are making, but also provide information on how to turn your hobby into a business. The Norwegian government wants to encourage entrepreneurship, especially for women, young people and people living in the rural areas of our country.
This is Epla in a nutshell: making a marketplace accessible for everybody, and making products from all over the country available to interested buyers. In general, people who start a business, and especially women, base it on their area of expertise, they don´t take large economical risks, and they often work alone. We want to provide not only a marketplace where everybody can try to sell the things they make, but also to find a community, to find support, inspiration and information. Nothing would be more rewarding than to see some of our sellers making a beloved hobby into a successful business.
h2.0: What does 'Epla' mean? Is there a story to choosing your brand name?
Siw: Epla is not an actual Norwegian word, but ’ei epla’ means ’an apple’ in Siw's and Rakel's dialect from
Finnmark, the northernmost parts of Norway. The reason we chose it was the positive associations the word gives, and the fact that it is short and easy to say in most languages. (And the internet domain was available!)
h2.0: People think of Epla as "The Norwegian Etsy" ‐ how much has Etsy been an inspiration for you? And: is there anything that you feel you have solved better than Etsy?
Siw: We love Etsy, and have spent lots of hours and dollars there. They have a great concept, and we are certainly inspirered by their success and ideas. We have developed a different concept than Etsy, which we believe will provide an advantage for our users. This is based on our vision to be both a startingplace when sellers first want to test the market and try to sell their products, and to be a provider of service to those who are or want to be a professional artist, designer or crafter.
We allow for small businesses to open a shop, or groups of people to open shops together. All sellers start an
EplaBasic, wich gives you a basic shop, and the possibility to add your products to the Epla database. For those who are professinonals we offer an
EplaPro‐shop wich provides all the benefits of Epla, but also gives them the opportunity to open their own internet‐store at their own web‐site/domain. This includes the possibility to change the design of their shop and several other advantages.
Another difference between Epla and Etsy is the fact that we don´t charge for listing items. We only charge a provision of kr5 + 5% when the item is sold. In other words:
No cure, no pay. In addition to this we are trying to keep Epla easy to understand and easy to use. We will not clutter the web‐site with unnecessary functions just because it might be fun, it is more important to us that the products are promoted successfully and that buyers find what they are looking for.
h2.0: What makes Epla attractive to sellers?
Siw: Epla is the first internet‐marketplace in Norway, and possibly Scandinavia, that offers the opportunity of selling your handmade products. The response from sellers has been remarkable and we have recieved a lot of praise for the delicate, easy-to-use design and for the functionality and easy set‐up of the store. We also believe we have a much broader audience, because of our openness to professionals and the benefits we provide trough EplaPro.
We are in constant dialogue with our sellers and are making changes to Epla based on their feedback. We pride ourselves in giving great service and helping those that need it fast and efficiently. Epla is growing day by day, both in number of buyers, sellers, products and clicks.
One of our goals when it comes to marketing Epla is that the sellers and the products are what we want to promote. In every press piece we use pictures of products, and we try to make sure that sellers are able to promote themselves. We use social media actively, our
Facebook fansite now has over 4,500 fans. All of them get litte appetizers (3 products from one Epla‐shop) from Epla on their facebook‐feed every day.
Epla is also upfront dealing with important topics related to taxes, running a business and laws and regulations that one has to deal with beeing a seller on Epla. We think of this as a service to our users, and we want to expand this further as we start developing Eplahagen (the Eplagarden, where sellers can grow and evolve).
h2.0: Is Epla open only to Norwegians / Scandinavian sellers? And what about the buyers?
Siw: For the time beeing Epla is only open to Norwegian sellers, but we have always planned to make it more than just a ’local market’. Buyers from abroad who want to shop at Epla are encouraged to contact the seller to make sure he or she feels comfortable sending their items abroad. Most sellers won´t mind, but we want to give every seller the choice. In time, this will be automated, so that buyers from abroad can choose items only from sellers that have signed up for international trade.
h2.0: I saw that you are upfront about topics such as tax IDs and clear names in shops. As far as I know, you're the only marketplace that outlines these very important topics. Why did you decide to
have a say on that, even though you are "just" the venue?
Siw: Epla's goal is to be a great marketplace, but also a place for those who want to expand and evolve within their area of business.
We want to contribute to entrepreneurship and give people from all over the country an opportunity to create their own workplace doing what they love.
We can only contribute to this by developing Epla further, from being a traditional internet‐based marketplace to giving information, inspiration, support and guidance as well. We will expand this part of our business with the development of Eplahagen. We have an objective to arrange courses and events that can help our sellers to market their products and that give them the opportunity to develop their business and help them expand their competence in neccessary areas.
h2.0: Epla's first four months in some figures ‐ can you share some stats with us?
Siw: Epla opened on November 16, 2009. We have been open for almost four months now, and have grown faster than we could have imagined. Even before the launch date we had over 2,000 items for sale. The number of items on Epla have now passed 20,000, and is growing for about 200 new items every day. At the end of Febuary over 4,000 items had been sold through Epla, and we are seeing an increase in sales numbers from week to week. Every day between 3,500‐4,500 unique users click onto Epla. Since we launced the website we have had over 2 million clicks, and approximately 70,000 users have visited Epla.
h2.0: Are you planning to launch any social shopping and/or community features for Epla? I see that a forum and a knowledge base (articles) are coming soon. Anything else your users can look forward to seeing and using soon?
Siw: We are in the process of developing
Eplahagen, wich we are hoping to launch this spring. We have just opened our blog
Eplabloggen, where users can read about news from Epla, where they can comment on what we write and express their views. Hopefully we can use Eplabloggen to share information and inspiration, and to communicate more directly with our users.
h2.0: "Handmade", finally after almost 15 years, seems to pop up at every corner in Europe now. Why, in your opinion, is this "handmade revolution" taking off so extremely well in our (postmodern) society?
Siw: There are a number of reasons the
handmade revolution is happening right now. First,
I think it is a reaction to the uncontrolled consumption in the industrialized world. We believe that mass consumption as we have seen it for the last few decades can not go on. Many of us have made a choice as to what values we want to pass on to our children, and conciousness about what we buy and how we use it, rather than unconcious consumption, is one of those good values. New values are growing in our society, or rather, old values are revived and presented as new.
We want the things we own to have an added value, to mean something to us, and to be more than just a status symbol. Things are stripped of status and are given emotion and that means not to buy and throw away in order to follow the latest fashion whim.
Good, handmade quality lasts longer and feels better.
We also find
handmade quite fashionable and want the products we buy to be unique and personal. Often items are made to order, and customers are allowed to affect the production‐process creatively. The item achieves an added value through this process, and we enjoy the personal affiliation to the product and to the producer. And last but not least;
handmaking and crafting is the new yoga. To work trough a creative process, to have ideas and to make it happen can be both stimulating and relaxing. Making things, whether it is painting, knitting, pottery or woodcarving, can be used as recreation. Many have made handmaking into a profession, but for those of us who aren´t there yet, handmaking lets us use parts of ourselves that we don´t have outlets for elsewhere.
h2.0: And you yourselves: what do you find inspiring about handmade products?
Siw: To us,
handmade means that the persons who made the pillowcases, the lamp or the sweater have enjoyed the process. They have had an idea, made the effort to go through the process of making this item, and they have loved it.
Handmade things are loved into existence, and it is a great feeling knowing this when you put on that sweater. We also like the fact that most items are unique; they often have a much better quality and attention to detail than mass produced products. And the people making handmade are really very nice! We have bought a lot of stuff from
different sellers on Epla, and the service and follow-up is great.
h2.0: Do you feel that this trend has changed your buying patterns? Do you buy more handmade than ever?
Siw: Of course! When at the mall, trying on something or thinking of buying mass-produced, we often stop ourselves. Wouldn´t it be much cooler if we could find something even better on Epla? And most of the time we do! We love the fact that we can contact the seller and ask questions directly, we can have items custom made, or clothes made to size. Not to mention that we can email the seller and praise their work. Wich is a lot of fun, because every seller really loves it when someone appreciates their efforts. And very often the artist or designer is willing to make quite an effort to satisfy the customers.
That is why we love handmade!
Thank you, Siw and Torunn, for your time and for this wonderful interview!
Photos © epla.no
Collage: handmade2.0
P.S. Die Marktplatzbesprechung für Epla
findet Ihr hier.
