Etsy, the online marketplace for handmade items, received a small funding round last week. The participants included Flickr founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, Albert Wenger (former president of del.icio.us) and Union Square Ventures. The money is going towards a redesign, some new hires and managing Etsy's growth. But the gesture itself is more significant: the web's all stars think Etsy is a winner.
Personally, I'm a big Etsy fan. In typical 2.0 fashion, the team seems to release new features every few weeks - using some really impressive Flash tools, you can now shop by color, by location or by time listed, among other things. Think of it as Flickr meets eBay. For a niche site they're driving astounding amounts of traffic, and they seem to have word of mouth marketing down to a tee. Impressive.
![[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]](http://sale-online.click/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/etsylarge.png){kind=link}