Web sites are building communities—and businesses—on the extending do-it-yourself craze

by Heather Green

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It’s an overcast December afternoon, but the Pop Up Community Center in downtown Manhattan is buzzing. Spread along a white woody table, a half-dozen people are ironing pliable bags together to create a fabric made of recycled matter. Others are bent over sewing machines, meander the soft into colorful tote bags, wallets, even pillows. Occasionally they turn for advice to Anda Lewis Corrie, who is chief this workshop on the body transforming old plastic bags into useful objects.

Just some other community service project? Not quite. Corrie works in marketing against Etsy, an online marketplace where people sell their own handmade crafts. And this workshop is all about sharing the do-it-yourself (DIY) actual feeling—an impulse that Etsy and a number of other companies, large and moderate, have converted into a sizable business. Etsy won’t reveal its revenues but expects to turn a profit early next year on what it takes in from a 20 cents-per-item listing fee and the 3.5% commission on goods that merchants put up to sale through the locality. In 2007 those merchants sold 1.92 million items worth a gross amount of $26.5 a thousand thousand, according to Etsy. The 2 1/2-year-old startup produces online videos, hosts virtual town halls, and runs workshops with the goal of persuading more folks to instil each other to create and sell crafts on Etsy. Since it’s a manner of eBay (EBAY) for handmade crafts, the more people who sign up to sell their handiworks without ceasing the site, the more fit the company does. Says Corrie: “We want to help people make a living making things.”

Although the craft craze is well-established, with sales hitting $31 billion in 2007, it’s taking off through a vengeance online. Hubert Burda Media, Germany’s 58-year-old sewing-magazine and pattern giant, relaunched its English-language BurdaStyle Web site in July to share sewing patterns that can be modified to act new designs by the site’s visitors. Sebastopol (Calif.) publisher O’Reilly Media launched Make and Craft over the past three years; they’re print and online how-to magazines that yerk examples from the intricate videos and purpose blueprints that readers submit online. At the site of British startup StyleShake, users design and work together online on their own cocktail dresses, which they can send to the company to have turned into clothing for them.

Many of these companies say they trace their lineage to the open-source technology movement formed in the ’90s by computer programmers who wanted to create software anyone could build upon. Rather than one expert teaching people how to perform matter, the open-source move underscored how groups of people could share expertise and build on that knowledge. Now this mindset is rapidly spreading. Says Elizabeth Osder, a visiting professor at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California: “There is this resurgence of interest in DIY and afterward the craving to put into bundles up pieces of information and share them in an open-source way.”

For Burda, the timing couldn’t be improved in health. The crew wants to occasion a virtual DIY community beyond Europe. It’s the biggest exemplar vender in that place, yet it claims less than 2% of the U.S. market. So while Burda doesn’t profit from the patterns that are pulled from its Web site, it hopes vocable of rant will boost sales of its other patterns in the U.S. Each week Burda publishes a different pattern online, for items such as wide-leg pantaloons or a pencil skirt with pleats. They appear as PDFs that visitors can copy to their computers or print disclosed. Sewers be able to alter the patterns as they fancy, and in that place are no restrictions on selling finished clothing.

The BurdaStyle community gets into full open-source swing after each modern archetype is posted. Members swap written tips and post photos in the digital court of justice and group blog on how to alter the designs. They even constitute detailed, step-by-step move smoothly shows demonstrating how to change the collar adhering a jacket or turn pajamas into maternity wear. Relaunched five months ago, BurdaStyle has about 29,000 members and clocks 1.5 million page views a month.