Etsy’s Sustainability

01

As part of an my honors program, I took a class called “honors reading” which is a flexible course that allowed me to explore a topic of my choosing. I took the course with a sustainability professor who also taught a course on corporate sustainability which connected my marketing coursework with coursework related to sustainability.

02

My goal was to evaluate Etsy as a corporation to see how sustainable they were. I was interested in Etsy because their brand is built upon the idea of supporting small artists and building sustainable shopping within communities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Etsy’s popularity grew tremendously as people chose to prioritize sustainable shopping and small businesses. However, Etsy is an international, multi-billion dollar company which brings into question how similar Etsy is compared to other “unsustainable” corporations.

03

I conducted a literature review of the different elements of Etsy’s business model including the ways they calculate their first, second, and third scope emissions. To evaluate the quality of their sustainability actions, I identified Etsy’s specific sustainability actions reported in their annual sustainability report from 2018-2023. Finally, I tracked the quality of those actions against several sustainability quality frameworks.

04

The final report was a systematic literature review and analysis of Etsy’s reported sustainability actions through different peer-reviewed sustainability frameworks. The report found that Etsy did not seem to engage in “strong” sustainability efforts as would be expected of a company publicly praised for their sustainability.