DaWanda

» see dawanda.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The people who make things by hand had DaWanda, and i am not one of them. i buy hardware, i do not knit it. A marketplace for handmade jewelry and hand-sewn bags was never going to be a site i opened, and one that lived mostly in German, for the German-speaking web, was doubly not mine. i knew it the way you know a shop you pass but never enter.

DaWanda opened in Berlin in December 2006, built by Claudia Helming and Michael Pütz, and the pitch was simple, an Etsy for the German-speaking market before most people there had heard of Etsy. Sellers listed the things they made themselves, buyers came for gifts you could not find in a chain store, and for a good while it worked. It spread out of Germany into Austria and Switzerland and then further across Europe.

At its height DaWanda was the craft marketplace of continental Europe, with sellers in the tens of thousands and buyers in the millions. It had done the hard thing, building a two-sided market out of nothing and making itself the default in its corner. In the mid-2010s it looked like one of Berlin's real e-commerce successes, the local champion in a category that felt safe from the American giants.

It was not safe. Etsy, larger and operating in the language the whole internet was drifting toward, kept growing across DaWanda's own markets, and DaWanda never managed to turn its size into profit. In July 2018 the founders admitted it could not grow further on its own. There was no rescue and no buyout, just an arrangement to walk its sellers over to Etsy, the very rival that had beaten it. The site closed on 30 August 2018. i only read about it afterward, an obituary for a shop i was never going to visit, in a country and a craft that were both not mine.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the language wall ~

The thing that killed DaWanda was not a blunder so much as a map. It had built a marketplace bounded by a language, and the internet does not respect that border for long. Etsy did not need to be better than DaWanda in German. It only needed to be bigger everywhere and available in English, which by the 2010s was where the buyers and sellers were already heading. A local champion in a global category is a fine business right up until the global one notices your market.

~ the long tail ~

What DaWanda left is a familiar European shape. A homegrown site does the early work of teaching a market to buy and sell online, gets it to real scale, then hands that trained audience to a larger American company at the end. Etsy inherited a community it did not have to build. The Berlin crafts marketplace that got there first became a redirect and a memory, and the people who had sold their handmade things through it packed up and set their tables out one platform over.

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