People Make Etsy

Back in mid-May you may remember I did a quick trip down to London to take part in filming Etsy's first ever TV advert.


Appications involved uploading a photo of yourself, with you products you sell, using the hash tag peoplemakeetsy to Instagram. 

Luckily I had a photo of mself with my drop spindle kits that was taken at my first ever Wonderwool 3 years ago. A few days later I got an email telling me to come on down to London just 4 days later...

The advert itself was filmed in one afternon at a TV studios in South Wimbledon, the very same place where The Last Leg is filmed, I might have done a little internal squee of excitement when I saw the signs labelling their parking....

The set is a fake street scene, that was apparently built for a now defunct daytime TV soap, so those houses you see in the advert are all just fronts.

The advert aired last Thursday during the first of the new season of One Born Every Minute, and will  be on for the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for it, and know that if you buy from me you're already ahead of most of the people in the UK!

Filming those 30 seconds took an entire afternoon, and the set up took all morning, everything in the advert is made by the people in it, and you can buy all of it from their Etsy shops, which I think it pretty cool.

As for me, I am most definitely background filler, I am at the very far end of the cul-de-sac, where I suspect they put the ones they woldn't trust to behave! By around the 30th take we'd all become like the naughty school kids who sit at the back of the classroom!

Here's the street from the opposite viewpoint of the camera, so you can see how many lovely things were tucked up out of sight. Lots of them are featuring in all the other promotions centreing around the advert though. 

The filming itself was done using a super high speed camera called a phantom. It was mounted in a really powerful truck which sped past the end of the street in a matter of seconds. The long suffering runners spent the entire day trying to meant sure we were all doing the right thing just as the car sped past, we all had particular sympathy for one poor bloke called Esra who was responsible for spreading around the fake smoke coming from the barbecue. We alwasy seemed to have too much, or too little, and the breeze that day seemed determined to remove all his efforts by the time the camera started moving.

As for the song, we had that playing too... I can vouch for it's ear-wormy qualities, I think I hummed it for 48 hours straight after the filming, and now the advert is airing it has ended up back in my head again.

It was a very long, very repetitive day, but I love the end result, and am incrediby happy to be part of it. Etsy is what gave my business the push it needed at the very start, and even though I could now move on to my own platform, I like being part of a community of people who are not afraid to do something a little bit different.  Every day when I am on the site I am amazed by the creativity of the people on there, it's become where I buy most of my gifts, both to myself and for others. CNBC just named the company as number 4 on it's list of Top 50 companies who are revolutionizing the business landscape, and I'm proud to be a part of it.



Finally, while you might not see me in the advert, you can spot me in this lovely behind the scenes footage, and yes, I did spend the entire day spinning.