Rob Kalin learned the secret to success while he was young. As a young child, he liked playing with a stuffed rabbit his mother had made. "At that time, we knew he would become a craftsman (工匠) in the future," Kalin's mother said.
Kalin's father was a carpenter (木匠) and taught him early on how to use his hands. In high school, Kalin was so interested in photography that he cut classes to take photos 18 hours a day. Eventually, Kalin ended up at New York University, studying classics and working as a carpenter. One night, his landlord asked him to build a website for his restaurant. "I didn't know anything about websites, but I built the basic site by looking through books in four weeks," Kalin recalls.
After working on a crafts site that provided "advice and a lot of hand-holding", Kalin recognized that there was no market for their goods. He wrote a fan letter to Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Flickr, who had sold his highly popular photo-sharing website to Yahoo! Impressed by Kalin's letter, he took a look at
Kalin's idea and invited him to San Francisco for a month in 2006. He taught Kalin how to build a website, and helped him borrow $615,000 from a bank.
With the help of Stewart, Kalin was able to create etsy.com, an online crafts fair that may be the largest market for handmade goods in the world. Last year, 350,000 woodworkers, and other craftsmen sold their one-of-a-kind goods on the four-year-old site. It sells everything from hand-knitted T-shirts to wooden electric guitars. In an age of chain stores and malls, it seems there's still a big market for the unique: custom-made (订制的) skirts and hand-painted tea sets. Today, Etsy's staff has increased to 70 employees, and more than three million consumers in 150 countries are buying goods on Etsy every year.
