Just last week, I bought something I needed for my new job on Etsy from a husband-and-wife team of artisans in Kyiv, so I found this article from The Hustle, “Why Etsy is a financial lifeline for artisans in Ukraine,” timely and fascinating and sobering. ||| TRR
One day last October in the southwestern Ukrainian city where Olena Hryhorenko lives, the lights went out. Her house lost access to electricity, water, and the internet. The streets turned pitch-black.
In the darkness, she reached for a flashlight and started to knit.
The blackout, caused by Russian attacks on Ukrainian power systems, lasted two days in Hryhorenko’s city of Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi and set the tone for a brutal winter of energy rationing and rolling blackouts. Over the next several months, Hryhorenko had electricity and water for four to six hours a day. At night, her family continued to dedicate limited battery power so Hryhorenko could practice her craft by flashlight.
Hryhorenko, who is 19 and a university student, has knitted since she was 12 and started an Etsy shop called Toysknit in 2018, selling knitted deers, squirrels, and bunnies in Easter and Christmas garb.
The cold, dark months were a challenge, but Hryhorenko managed to keep her business afloat and ship orders on time. In the last year, she’s sold 100+ knitted figurines to buyers across the world, using the money to help support her family.
Across Ukraine, there are thousands of crafters like Hryhorenko. For years, they’ve turned traditional hobbies into side hustles and full-fledged businesses, developing an outsized presence on the popular online marketplace. Per capita, Ukraine has more Etsy items for sale than every large European country except the United Kingdom and Germany.
[…]
But life in a war zone will never be normal.
Hryhorenko says she’s had to adapt to a new reality and is not optimistic the war will end soon. She believes morale is getting worse as Ukrainians struggle from depressed wages, fear for their children’s future, and cope with the constant fear that they could lose everything.
In this harrowing time, she’s thankful she can knit. When Hryhorenko relaunched her store not long after the start of the war, skeptical anyone would want to deal with long shipping times and other potential complications, she wasn’t sure she would even have that. Within two hours, somebody purchased a pair of knit bunnies.
The moment offered her a feeling she feared the war had taken away: inspiration.
Source: Mark Dent, “Why Etsy is a financial lifeline for artisans in Ukraine,” The Hustle, 29 September 2023
