Hi everyone. There’s a lot to respond to here, but I’ll try.
Firstly, you are right Joy, we have taken the decision to try featuring just one maker a month this year and see how that works. As a really small team, we have to carefully prioritise our work, and our experience over the past few years has been that featuring a different maker every fortnight limits what we are able to achieve. Our hope is that by extending the feature to a month in length, we can better explore not just that maker’s work but also their craft in more detail, while also freeing up time to promote and share other makers across our social media, and allowing us as a team to focus on other tasks which will help Folksy grow.
As an example, if we featured a stained glass maker, we could then not only talk about them but also create more content around stained glass as a skill during that month, potentially creating reels showing the process, write an Exploring Techniques article for the blog where people can learn more about the craft and/or publish a tutorial. Not only does that give us more engaging content (which helps us reach a bigger audience), but it also means that rather than publishing 2-4 posts on social media about the featured maker over that fortnight, we can spread those out over a month, giving more space to other pieces, makers and topics we would like to share.
Our hope is that this will work better for the featured maker, us and all of you - and ultimately that everyone can get more out of it. Although the Meet The Maker feature might not seem like a lot of work, it is, and we’d like the time we put into the interviews and content to be as effective, interesting and engaging as possible.
In terms of choosing the featured maker, we always try to have a mix of new and more established artists and makers. We do and have in the past asked our featured makers for suggestions of who they might like to interview, and used that to inform our decisions, but it is us as a team who decide. Things we are looking for when choosing our featured maker include:
- fantastic images
- an interesting story
- underepresented crafts or makers
- a mix of heritage crafts and pioneering modern crafts
- or conversely trending crafts
- a range of geographical locations
- a range of backgrounds (eg trained professional potters as well as self-taught crafters working at their kitchen table)
- a strong social media presence
- the ability to create great content we can share on social media is a bonus too
How many sales someone has had is not usually a factor. We want to try to support Folksy sellers at all stages in their journey - so those who have been with us for a long time as well as those who are just starting out.
If you feel there are makers who we have missed and you would love to see featured, we’ve set up a new thread where you can tell us your suggestions - Who would you like to see as a featured maker on Folksy?
In terms of featured sellers breaking our terms and conditions, this is my mistake. I do usually always check that everything is in order and we always ask that our featured sellers have a clickable link to Folksy in their bios on social media - but I missed it this time. We have asked our current featured maker to remove all external links but please remember that this forum is not a space to call out fellow users for breaking terms and conditions - there can be many reasons someone has not adhered to a particular rule and it is often not intentional. If you see something that you do not feel should be on Folksy, we ask you to report it to our Support team (as I know some of you have, thank you) rather than sharing publicly on the forums or Facebook group.
In terms of the star that the featured maker has next to their name, this was an icon that was chosen many years ago to indicate they have been featured on Folksy. We have previously discussed as a team whether this is the right icon to use, as it is not necessarily clear to customers what the star indicates. So that may change but we are currently prioritising SEO work which takes precedence.
I hope this (long!) reply helps and that I have answered most or all of your queries. If not, please do let us know.