Grab your popcorn

I do not check the forums at Etsy as often as I should. When you are a seller you should really check in because there are often important messages from the administrators as well as useful information from other merchants. Usually, I am pretty lax. Lately, I have found that they can also serve as a great form of entertainment. Who needs reality TV when you can read the back and forth on some of the forum threads. Drama with a capital D. Sometimes I grab my popcorn and sit down to reading. Recently I have noticed that a lot of the drama comes from peeps here in Chicago. Imagine that. About a week ago there was this ranting seller who was accusing another seller of copying her "process". She believed that she had created a special third ingredient for an already long established process and that this other person had stolen it. Yes, she sounded as if she was a little cray-cray. It turned out that the process was nothing new and that there were hundreds of other artists selling the same type of stuff on Etsy. Oh yes, and she actually explained her process in the description of her items! She also had the nerve to change her item listings so that they included a jab at the work of the other shop owner declaring it sub-par. People started telling her she needed to back off. Girl, it got ugly. The accused showed up in the thread, but she was completely professional and courteous. Of course, the thread was closed by the admin when they finally caught on that the original post was a "calling out". I was hanging on to every comment until that time. Wait, it gets better. After the thread was closed, Cray-cray had the nerve to start another one with the same topic and this time including some copies of e-mails. To make it worse she accused "the accused" of lying about the recent death of her mother which made the accused respond again because she was feeling attacked. The poor woman had been receiving e-mails from Cray-cray for awhile and then was accused of lying about the death of her mother. See? Popcorn time. I just looked at Cray-cray's shop profile and this is what she has written there (I did not correct typos) :
Recently I've ben harrassed abused, called every name in the book by a very select few people. On fact, some of these people even felt the need to write nasty things about me on ratemyteachers.org

I am severely hurt, but I kove to create, so I will continue to do so despite it all. If you do hear anything negative about my shop, rest assured, I'm just a good person with a few internet bullies. Oh! And their IP addresses can and will be traced. Just in case you are thinking about doing such a thing yourself.

OK, Cray-cray.

So, let me get to the real reason for this post. I was trolling the forums again and came across a post about Urban Outfitters stealing designs from artists on Etsy as well as other venues. The comments were up to about 17 pages (I think) before it was closed. The story began with this Tumblr post here . It was then on the Huffington post here . It then got crazy and went viral which you can see with the power of the tweet here. So, I pop me up some new corn and I have a seat to read all of the comments on Etsy. I will condense a lot of it by telling you that most of the comments were foul language and hatred aimed at Urban Outfitters and full support of Tru.che. Until...someone raised an interesting point. There were many artists who had created and sold very similar designs before her and yet, she was getting all of the publicity and support. What about those before her that were not featured in the article, but had the same item before she sold hers? What do you think? Should it have been researched a little better by those that wrote the articles or it is just her bonanza for being the squeaky wheel? I saved the best for last. As of two days after the article ran, she had received over $50,000.00 in orders. I have no idea how much that has gone up since I last looked. Urban Outfitters had pulled the item from their website and according to the rumor mill over at the Etsy forum, staff had been notified to also pull the item from the shelves.