Dive Brief:
- Etsy President and Chief Growth Officer Kruti Patel Goyal will replace Josh Silverman as CEO on New Year’s Day, the marketplace announced Wednesday. Silverman will become the executive chair of the board.
- Goyal was previously Depop CEO, a job she took in 2022, about a year after Etsy bought the secondhand apparel site for $1.6 billion. A longtime Etsy executive, she returned to take the growth strategy role in March.
- Silverman took the reins over eight years ago, at a time when Amazon was moving to encroach on Etsy’s turf and an activist investor was agitating for a change in leadership. On Wednesday, Etsy released Q3 results that beat its own expectations.
Dive Insight:
Speaking to analysts Wednesday morning, Silverman called Goyal “fabulously talented” and “a key part of Etsy's leadership for over 15 years.” He said he called her back earlier this year to Etsy’s executive ranks “following an incredible two-year run as Depop’s CEO, reigniting their growth.”
“Now in our third decade, Etsy is entering a new phase — one focused on harnessing AI to further personalize and transform the shopping experience in ways that were previously unimaginable,” he said. “It's an exciting moment and perfect timing, I believe, for fresh perspective and a new leader.”
Goyal will arrive with the marketplace retailer in healthier shape than when Silverman took over in 2017. In Q3 revenue rose more than 6% year on year to $678 million, excluding Reverb, which the company sold earlier this year. Net income expanded nearly 32% to $75.5 million. Gross merchandise sales, excluding Reverb, edged up 0.9% to $2.7 billion, per Wednesday's release. Active sellers dropped about 11% to 5.5 million, however.
At Etsy, gross merchandise sales dropped 2.4% to $2.4 billion, though GMS transactions on its app grew 5% and were approaching half of GMS. At Depop, GMS rose nearly 40% to $292 million, with GMS in the U.S. up nearly 60%.
Executives said they were seeing an early boost from Etsy’s partnership with OpenAI, announced last month, where U.S. ChatGPT users can discover and buy items from Etsy sellers in the U.S. Ultimately, this is just another channel, though one that is well-suited to Etsy, according to Silverman.
“I think people are going to shop agentically sometimes, and, when they do so, I think the smart agents are not going to say, ‘Here's the answer.’ ... I think they're going to provide a range of choice,” he said. “They're going to say, for example, ‘This is the cheapest thing you can buy, this is the thing that will arrive the fastest, and this is the thing that's most special or unique.’ And in that offering of ‘Here's a few curated choices,’ I think, disproportionately, Etsy is going to be presented and is going to win, and a lot more often than consumers on their own might have thought of Etsy.”
