Today’s guest is Alex Wright, who is the director of research at Etsy. We discuss the partnership between qualitative and quantitative research at Etsy and how his background in journalism helps him with the storytelling aspects of managing the research function.

Etsy’s not just in the business of trying to generate maximal profits every quarter. Yes, we’d like to be profitable, but we also want to serve the community of sellers; we want to be environmentally responsible; we want to support the local community. – Alex Wright

Show Links

* Alex Wright

* Follow Alex on Twitter

* Cataloging the World – Alex Wright

* Etsy

* Rob Kalin

* Jill Fruchter

* Roxie Karpen

* DoubleClick

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Transcript

Steve Portigal: Alex, thanks very much for being with us. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today.

Alex Wright: Hi, Steve. Thanks for having me.

Steve: Let’s just start very broadly as we do, and have you tell us about Etsy and what’s your role there, and what that’s about.

Alex: Sure. I started at Etsy about a year and a half ago. I was the first full time researcher hired at Etsy. Not that Etsy had never done any research before, but typically that it involved consultants or contractors or we had a product manager, at one point, who had previously been a researcher. There was some level of research going on.

The company made a decision that they wanted to put more of a focused effort around doing, especially UX research. I think there was a feeling that Etsy had gotten very good at experimentation and A/B testing and had a pretty well-developed approach to data analytics and experimentation. I think that there was a feeling that there was something missing and they wanted to create more space for qualitative research. I came in as a lone wolf researcher [laughs] about a year and a half ago. In the period since then, we’ve been able to grow the team. We’re now about a 10 person research team doing a combination of both UX research and market research, as well as some market trends analysis. We’re a hybrid team. Etsy is very product-oriented culture, so we tend to strongly emphasize UX research. We are now starting to do more marketing and trying to figure out how we can support that more effectively by doing more market research kind of stuff, too.

Steve: Before I ask you about that, maybe you could explain what Etsy is, in case anybody, somehow, doesn’t know.

Alex: Sure. Etsy is a marketplace for handmade and vintage products. It’s been around for almost 10 years now. We are now a marketplace with over a million sellers. In 2013, over a billion dollars’ worth of products flowed through the marketplace.

Our business is fairly straightforward. It’s a marketplace, we take a small commission on products that are sold on the site. Then we have a few other revenue streams like we have some promoted listi...