Regretsy

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

~ the goodbye ~

Etsy in 2009 was a handmade marketplace growing fast enough that anyone could open a shop in an afternoon, and the consequence of anyone opening a shop is that some of the shops are remarkable. Regretsy collected those. One listing at a time, with a caption, under a slogan that later became the book title: where DIY meets WTF.

The woman behind it was not an anonymous blogger who got lucky. April Winchell had spent decades as a working voice actress and Los Angeles radio host, and her father was Paul Winchell, the ventriloquist who also voiced Tigger. She wrote Regretsy as Helen Killer, and the professional comic timing is the reason it hit fifteen million views in its opening week rather than circulating for a month among crafters.

Random House won a bidding war and published the book on 6 April 2010. What is less remembered is the money. Regretsy's readers were organized into charity drives through the site, and by 1 March 2012 those drives had raised over two hundred thousand dollars, including a Christmas campaign buying presents for the children of two hundred families.

On 28 January 2013 Winchell posted that she was done. She had been cast as Sylvia in Wander Over Yonder, the Disney Channel series from Craig McCracken with Lauren Faust producing, and she said plainly that she had no jokes left about crafting. The archive was frozen on 1 February and never updated again.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the christmas paypal canceled ~

On 4 December 2011, with the toys already bought, PayPal froze the account holding the Secret Santa money and told Winchell that her Donate button was reserved for registered nonprofits. The remedy it offered was that she manually refund thousands of two-dollar donations, one at a time, in the week before Christmas.

She wrote it up, and the internet did the rest inside forty eight hours. PayPal's own Facebook page filled with people describing it as the company that canceled Christmas for two hundred families, and the story ran in national press and on television. On 6 December PayPal released the funds, apologized, and added a hundred dollars of its own to each of the two hundred families.

~ the exit ~

Nothing had gone wrong with the site. It still had about two hundred thousand visitors a month at the end, which is a working property by any measure. The author simply went back to the career she already had, and a blog built entirely on one person's voice has no way to continue without that person.

The domain spent years redirecting to aprilwinchell.com, then put up a notice promising an archive that has not arrived. Today regretsy.com does not resolve at all. Everything the site was is in the Wayback Machine and in whatever quantity of its images people saved.

Etsy itself barely registered in Turkey in those years, since it meant paying in dollars for something shipped across an ocean, and the craft-marketplace boom passed by without me noticing it. The reflex Regretsy ran on, a crowd gathering to mock a thing in public with better jokes than the thing deserved, I did recognize. In Turkish that was ekşi sözlük, in a different format, with entries instead of listings.

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