Membership Info
Cleveland Handmade is an Etsy street team. Our purpose is to promote each other and Etsy as a whole in the Greater Cleveland area and to forge social bonds among Etsy artists in our area. We get to know each other and each other’s work through our active Etsy forum thread and occasional in-person gatherings.
Membership Benefits
1. Opportunity to have your work seen by other team members and reap the rewards of informal cross-promotion and networking.
2. Opportunity to participate in more formal team promotions, such as challenges, contests, virtual trunk shows, and PR.
3. Opportunity to be considered for a Cleveland Handmade featured artist interview (offered first to consistently active team members).
4. Eligibility to use the team tag (clevelandteam) on your Etsy listings, which will link your work through the Shop link on the Cleveland Handmade website.
5. A link to your shop on the Cleveland Handmade Artist page and on Etsy’s Teams page (after a probationary period).
6. A link to your blog (if you have one) on the Cleveland Handmade website.
7. The joy of getting to know a diverse group of creative people who live near you.
Membership Qualifications
1. You must have an active Etsy shop (no empty shops).
2. You must live in the Greater Cleveland area: Cuyahoga, Lorain, Medina, Portage, Geauga, Lake, Ashtabula, or Trumbull county.
3. Your main focus is handmade, not vintage or supplies (vintage and/or supply sellers are welcome to become associate members under those categories).
Membership Requirements
1. You must conduct your business ethically: treat your customers well and respect your fellow artists. While we recognize there is nothing new under the sun, blatantly ripping off others’ work (whether artwork or descriptions or blog posts) and passing it off as your own original idea is not tolerated and will result in your being booted from the team. You must not have any unresolved negative feedback in your shop.
2. You must respect other team members. We have built a team we are proud of, and we cherish our camaraderie and our quiet oasis in what can be the Wild West of the Etsy forums.
3. We ask that you participate at least occasionally in our Etsy forum thread. It’s really the backbone of our team, where most connections are made and information is exchanged. Constant chatting is not a requirement of membership — you will have other opportunities to participate in different ways — but please at least introduce yourself and get to know a little about your other team members.
4. You must supply a working e-mail address at which you can be contacted, and you must respond to periodic check-in requests. A subscription to our team member e-mail list is a requirement for membership in Cleveland Handmade, since it is the only way we have of ensuring that all members get important team information and mandatory check-in notices. We will automatically subscribe you when we approve your membership. IF YOU UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS LIST, YOU ARE INDICATING THAT YOU NO LONGER WANT TO BE PART OF THE TEAM. If you have an overzealous spam filter, please do what you need to do to ensure that mail originating from clevelandhandmade.com doesn’t get caught in it.
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Please note that membership qualifications and/or requirements may change at any time. Team leadership has been discussing implementing a tiered membership system, in which members who put more into the team will reap more rewards from the team in a more formal way.
Because of the number of requests we receive to join the team, because of the time it takes to add a new member, and because so many of those people disappear soon after we jump through all the hoops necessary to add them, never to be seen again, we have limited new membership processing to once or twice a month. It may take up to a month to process your membership. Please be patient.
If you have more than one shop you would like to have listed, you must apply separately for each one.
So, if you want to become a member, please submit your information at this link, then visit the Etsy forum thread linked above and dive right in. We’d love to get to know you.
