When Etsy partnered with our sister company SYLVAIN on a brand refresh, there was a clear challenge: Etsy’s existing brand system wasn’t showing up strongly enough in digital. Etsy’s brand promise has always to keep commerce human: real people making real things. But as Etsy grew, the product experience became to feel incoherent and unrelated to Etsy. Users and sellers would visit with a strong sense of what Etsy stands for, only to enter the app and feel like they'd crossed into a different world.
A previous attempt at a brand refresh had focused only on marketing applications. Etsy is experienced primarily through product—its app and website—not just through campaigns or out-of-home moments. Any refresh needed to work just as well in everyday product interactions as it did in big, expressive marketing placements.
SYLVAIN, known for brand strategy and visual identity, brought in Upstatement to help ensure the refreshed brand could translate seamlessly across Etsy’s digital ecosystem. Our role was to bridge brand and product, grounding the visual system in real customer journeys and shaping guidance that could scale across Etsy’s digital surfaces.
Starting with the buyer journey
As SYLVAIN explored visual directions for the brand, we focused on deeply understanding the buyer experience. We mapped the end-to-end journey from the customer’s point of view, with particular attention to the happy path:
- Entering the experience
- Browsing and searching
- Exploring product detail pages
- Completing checkout
This helped us identify where brand expression could meaningfully enhance the experience, not just decorate it. We looked for moments where emotion, clarity, or confidence could reduce friction, encourage discovery, or help people move forward.
Thinking about Etsy as a host
To guide our work, we developed a simple lens inspired by a familiar idea: Etsy as the host of a gathering. A good host knows when to:
- Set the tone and make people feel welcome
- Make thoughtful connections between people
- Step in to help when someone needs direction
We found that the buyer journey moved through similar modes. Early moments needed to feel expressive and inviting. Mid-journey moments benefited from helping people discover products, makers, and ideas that felt personal. Later moments, especially around checkout, called for clarity, efficiency, and trust.
This way of thinking helped us decide how prominently the brand should show up in different parts of the experience, and when it should step back in service of usability.
Tuning brand expression in product
While SYLVAIN defined the core visual system, we worked in parallel to apply it across real product surfaces. We asked:
- What baseline level of brand presence should exist everywhere to create cohesion?
- Where should the brand become more expressive and emotional?
- Where should it quiet down to support focus and task completion?
Through sketching, prototyping, and close collaboration with both Etsy and SYLVAIN, we pressure-tested the brand across key touchpoints, tuning it to feel cohesive, flexible, and unmistakably Etsy in product contexts.
A Toolkit Designed for Scale
The outcome of this work was a comprehensive product brand toolkit that Etsy’s teams could use directly within their design system. The toolkit provided guidance on:
- How color should be used across different types of moments
- Typography and hierarchy in product contexts
- Logo usage across surfaces
- Graphic systems, including icons, illustrations, and silhouettes
- Layouts, grids, and component patterns
- Motion principles tied back to the overall experience
One defining idea from SYLVAIN was the square: a visual metaphor for Etsy as a modern town square. From that simple form, an expansive family of shapes could emerge. Together, we explored how those shapes could move beyond marketing and into product—used selectively to highlight moments of energy and delight without overwhelming the experience.
This toolkit gave Etsy’s designers both flexibility and guardrails, enabling creativity while maintaining coherence across a large and evolving platform. Today, this work is live across Etsy’s app and web experience.
Extending the System to Sellers
After rolling out the buyer experience, Etsy invited us back to extend the same thinking to the seller side of the platform.
Rather than reusing the buyer lens, we started by understanding the seller experience on its own terms. Seller tools are more desktop-oriented, more task-focused, and closer to a creative workspace than a marketplace.
From that research, we identified a set of recurring needs. Sellers need help getting oriented and understanding what matters most. They need calm, predictable spaces when completing focused tasks. And they need flexible tools that give them control as they shape their shops and businesses.
Using the shared design system, we applied the refreshed brand in ways that supported those needs, reusing existing patterns where possible and identifying areas where the system needed to evolve to better serve sellers.
As with the buyer experience, we delivered clear guidance across color, typography, layouts, components, motion, and support patterns, tuned specifically for seller workflows.
Designing for a Large Organization
Across both phases, we worked closely with Etsy’s internal design teams. With a large and distributed organization, every decision had to scale not just visually, but operationally.
Their partnership helped ensure the system struck the right balance: expressive but responsible, flexible but bounded. Designers could be creative while staying aligned with a shared vision for the experience.
A Brand Built to Work
This work reinforced a belief we share with SYLVAIN: a brand isn’t finished until it works in product. By grounding brand expression in real customer journeys, and by designing systems rather than one-off solutions, we helped Etsy bring their refreshed identity to life in the everyday moments of buying, selling, and making.
