What the Heck is an “Etsy Treasury”?

If you follow us on Twitter or are our Facebook fan, you might have seen us link to something called a “treasury” now and again. I remember that the first two times someone tried to explain Etsy Treasuries to me, I was kind of lost and hoped it was something obscure that wouldn’t come up again.

Basically, an Etsy Treasury is a grid of 12 items that are for sale on Etsy. Members of the community scour the site for items that fit a theme that interests them such as “owls”, “summer”, the color pink, or really anything at all.

Member-created treasuries only last for a few days and are fun to browse, and here’s one key thing about them – there’s a chance that the Etsy admins might use a member-created treasury on the home page, which conveniently is also a grid of 12 items that is refreshed every hour of the day. Ah, the intersection of crowdsourcing and user-generated content :-)

That happened to us on December 3rd – Tias included our Fruit Basket lollipops in her treasury, and between 7-8pm Pacific, they were up on the homepage in all their glory! We had a massive freakout and Kate nabbed this screenshot for posterity:

We confirmed something, namely that a homepage feature can be a firehose of attention – even though it just lasts one hour. In that time, the Fruit Basket lollipops garnered over 1200 views. Wowza!

Common wisdom in the Etsy forums says that the better your product photography, the better your chances of being selected for a treasury and the home page. So we’d be remiss if we didn’t wrap up this post with another shout out to Mr. Keeker for his rockin’ photo skills that show our candy to its best advantage!

Anyway, now when we tell you we created a treasury or that we were featured in someone else’s treasury, maybe it’ll make more sense. Or maybe not.