When Etsy bought Grand St. last April, the plan was to let Grand St. continue to operate its maker marketplace for tech hardware. But that’s about to change. At the end of this month, Grand St. will stop processing orders and on October 1, listings on the site will become inactive. At that point, Grand St.’s site will just be a gallery of content and photos.
That’s because the Grand St. team has taken on a lot more projects at Etsy, so from a user experience and maintenance perspective, it made sense to move Grand St. away from commerce, Etsy Senior PR Manager Nicole Summer told TechCrunch.
“We at Etsy and Grand St. have truly appreciated all the hard work from Grand St. makers, and we welcome them to learn more about joining the Etsy community,” Summer said. “The Grand St. team has become an integral part of the Etsy organization, working on innovative projects to help our sellers scale. We’re grateful to have them on board and excited to continue the work we’re doing to empower our sellers to achieve their creative business goals on their own terms.”
For background, Grand St. sells things like solar chargers, a smart light for nighttime bike rides and The Cash Cannon for making it rain. Before the acquisition, Grand St. had raised $1.3 million in seed funding from First Round Capital, David Tisch, Gary Vaynerchuk, betaworks, Collaborative Fund, MESA+, Quotidian Ventures, and Undercurrent.