Today, Etsy hosted Etsy Up: Holiday Edition, our first-ever global holiday kickoff event for sellers around the world. The holiday shopping season is the busiest, most important time of year for many small businesses and we want to equip them to be as successful as possible, especially in the face of economic uncertainty.

Etsy Up gave sellers a one-stop-shop for all things holiday prep. The interactive online experience included insider access to trends, tools, and actionable takeaways to help sellers’ shops get discovered and grow.

With about 80-thousand registered attendees, this virtual event was also the largest-ever gathering of Etsy sellers in the company's history; a testament to the engagement and commitment of our incredible community.

I was especially excited to open the event by sharing insights directly with our sellers about how Etsy is helping position them for success in an ever-evolving e-commerce landscape. The day was also jam-packed with advice and inspiration from successful sellers and industry experts alike. And, true to our mission to Keep Commerce Human, Etsy Up facilitated impactful connections between the sellers who took part.

A few of the key sessions focused on areas that our sellers tell us are most important to them, like:

• Etsy Marketplace Insights & Trends and how to incorporate them into products and photography.
• Marketing strategies that stand out on social media including live shopping, product drops, and content marketing.
• Managing a business during uncertain times, with tips and advice from real sellers on how they evolved their businesses to keep up with the changing world around them over the past two years.
• Understanding search engine optimization (SEO) to help boost visibility this holiday season.

Etsy Up is just one of the many ways we’re helping sellers gear up for the holidays. We’re also:

• Investing nearly $600 million in marketing this year alone. We think we’re just scratching the surface of getting buyers to discover Etsy sellers. Our holiday ad campaign is expected to debut in November.
• Continuing to enhance our newly launched Sell on Etsy app, which added requested features based on extensive research -- like adding photos and listing videos directly from a mobile device -- while improving features sellers love, like access to detailed insights about their shop’s performance.
• Redesigning the Etsy Seller Handbook, which is a gateway to our community spaces, events, upcoming feature opportunities, and the Help Center. We’ll launch the new homepage in the coming weeks and roll out even more updates in the months ahead.
• Helping sellers to create innovative and engaging content on our new Explore feature, which surfaces seller videos to buyers in personalized feeds full of creative inspiration.

Many of the areas that we’re focused on leading up to this holiday season are a direct result of input from our seller community. We take their collective feedback to heart and strive to align their needs with our investments. Listening to and acting with our sellers’ best interests in mind is a fundamental element of our business because when they succeed, Etsy succeeds.

The success of today’s event reaffirmed my belief that our community is poised for success and that participating sellers will have an even sharper edge heading into this holiday season. A replay of the full event is available here