Billing itself as an Etsy for Eco, London-based Eco Market is a natural online marketplace that connects buyers with eco-conscious products they’ll love — and sellers who share their passion for the environment.

Launched in 2010 under the name Ethical Community, the first iteration of Eco Market was born from the pleasure that founders Liam Patterson and Jason Dainter experienced when they received gifts with a personal connection to the giver. Realizing that the eco community is as much about relationships as products, they saw a need for a more personalized online marketplace experience.

“We’re concentrating on community, the stories of our sellers and the content that surrounds them,” Dainter told Desk.com’s Alyson Stone in a February 2012 blog post. “Customers seem hungry for an opportunity to purchase ethically from real people, and to read about the journeys.”

In early 2013, Dainter and Patterson decided there was still room for improvement. The site underwent a drastic revamp in an effort to better align the brand with the vision.

“We realized we had this opportunity,” Dainter told Techcrunch’s Sarah Perez in a March 2013 story. “We could either run with this brand that we weren’t totally happy with, and this platform that wasn’t scaling the way we wanted it to, or we could step back and fix what we should have fixed to start with.”

The result is a streamlined, social site that encourages visitors to build personal relationships with eco-friendly sellers. Less popular features like forums and events have been dropped, but now users can create profiles, share stories and videos with other members and even maintain “love lists” a la Pinterest.

“Our goal as a company is not only to give (often small one man band) sellers a platform to sell products,” the site claims, “but also to give consumers all the tools and information they need to demystify ethical shopping.” If that isn’t grand enough, the site also seeks to “create open debates about key issues that will help shape our planet.”

Online marketplace offerings are as varied and unique as they are eco-friendly. Buyers who came in search of fair-trade coffee or free-range chicken will also find organic clothing and jewelry. Acai vitamins, green kitchen appliances, biodegradable stationery — the selection is exhaustive.

What’s more, buyers can sort the store by the eco and natural causes most important to them, with vegan face scrubs in one search and recycled wine glasses in another. And sellers can attach ethical credentials and certificates to their products, ensuring that everything in the store is legitimately eco.

But Patterson and Dainter claim that Eco Market’s vision is less about items for sale and more about personal connections.

“It’s more about the story,” Dainter said. ”Maybe it’s handmade, but who made it by hand?”

With more than 15,000 products and 1,600 sellers to choose from, there are plenty of opportunity for buyers to find the answer.

Images: Eco Market

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Berlin, Germany has become the world’s contemporary creative capital not in spite, but as a direct consequence, of its post-Apocalyptic legacy. In the humiliating and fragile aftermath of World War II, the Soviet construction of the Berlin Wall effectively calcified the society’s healing process, and the city remained a willy nilly bastion of still recent blood-let and stark economic inequity. Officially, the Wall fell over 20 years ago, but its first cracks were but symbols. Its physical dismantling was hard-won, and this is to say nothing of the intervening, painstaking gains toward cultural reunification.

View of Berlin from Hello Etsy conference center rooftop

In the wake of the global financial crisis, Germany’s export driven industry has emerged as an economic powerhouse and finds itself in the awkward position of propping up the entire euro-zone from financial collapse; yet Berlin, a city of artists and ex-pats, remains poor, with unemployment rates hovering around 12 percent. It’s Berlin’s ongoing monetary malaise that has over the past twenty years evolved this locale into a destination spot for creatives the world over – visionaries attracted by the city’s ever diversifying internationalism, cheap rent, and abiding sense of emergence. Berlin is, if anything, a city that is still coming into being and lacks a singular, unified cultural definition – in this marvelous metropolis there is nobody telling you what to do.

These reasons make Germany’s capital the ideal location for last weekend’s Hello Etsy: A Summit on Small Business and Sustainability. A wildly successful, 2005 founded online marketplace for handmade and reclaimed goods, Etsy is even more so an alternative economic template that relies on interdependence and human scale sustainability rather than competitive, winner-takes-all free-market capitalism. The conference in fact wasn’t an occasion for the transaction of wares and currency at all, but rather an international convergence of creatives sharing skills and exchanging ideas about community based initiatives.

ewerk dining hall – note industrial hook in upper-right panel

Hosted in ewerk, the oldest preserved commercial power plant in Germany (constructed in 1885), Hello Etsy held court in this building surviving two world wars, enduring destructive Communist rule, and eventually emerging as one of the world’s most influential techno music clubs. Against this storied backdrop, Etsy was in full form, ratcheting up the DIY factor with all manner of artisanal accents – from bright hued bricks of handmade soap and homespun towels by the bathroom sinks to conference dining hall tables decorated with reclaimed milk cartons repurposed into planters for potted herbs and other green flora.

The line-up of approximately 40 speakers addressed over 500 attendees and delegates from the United States and Europe, and included a broad spectrum of thought-leaders – from Facebook’s Head of Commerce Partnerships, Google’s Conversion Specialist and Twitter’s European Communications Manager, to an urban farmer, filmmaker, and author. Panels and lectures ranged from practical education (nuts and bolts of running a small business, for example) to the theoretical (corporate globalization is unsustainable, unethical and Etsy’s word, “unfun“).

Attendees at Hello Etsy listen and learn

Main Room speaker Judy Wicks, a spitfire social activist in her retirement years with no intention of slowing down, delivered a talk about what she calls the Local Living Economies Movement. This theoretical framework emphasizes an alternative business model in which growth is measured not in terms of market expansion, but rather through maximized relationships-businesses reinvesting profits right back into the community generating its revenue to develop deeper networks of solidarity, belonging and, Judy’s word, “fun.”

Hello Etsy conference organizers also published an event specific compendium of essays penned by the summit’s panelists and speakers, with a wellspring of advice, abstracts, and inspiration from figures like Alabama Chanin founder and designer, whose contributing essay “The Commandments” offered ethical business entrepreneurs advice such as: Quality is its own testament. Run toward fear. Share and play well with others. Get a good accountant (and an understanding of QuickBooks).

Do bricks of handmade soap really hold the answer to our future? Etsy thinks so

At its core, Hello Etsy was a celebration of business, a critical examination of capitalism’s current un-sustainability as well as ideas about harnessing and transforming the existing system to grow a sane, compassionate future. Judy Wicks in her lecture put it well:  The heart of business doesn’t have to be an engine of greed, but rather sharing love within your community to yield a ‘living’ return on investment.

Business, at its core, is about relationships; money is but a tool for building them.

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