With its new handmade goods marketplace, Michaels looks to rebrand the company’s image

In the days before the internet, there were only a handful of places where consumers could scratch their arts-and-crafts itch. Fast forward to today, and the Etsys and Pinterests of the world have become a safe online haven for DIYers.

Michaels, which was founded in 1973 and has more than 1,300 locations across North America, is stepping more into that Etsy and Pinterest lane with a beta test of a handmade goods marketplace that allows people to sell custom-made pieces.

• The platform, called MakerPlace, is directly tied to a larger digital transformation that the company has undergone over the past few years and includes an expanded product assortment and a rebranding of the company’s vision.

Helping lead this effort is Heather Bennett, EVP of marketing and e-commerce at Michaels, who told Retail Brew that MakerPlace sellers largely are already Michaels customers and can further entrench themselves into the company’s ecosystem.

• “People who sell even on other platforms or who want to open up a business and sell, they’ve got to get their componentry from somewhere,” Bennett said. “We are going to have ways to incentivize them to purchase componentry from us, so that’s ultimately what they will sell from a finished goods standpoint on the marketplace.”

Bulking up: Bennett said MakerPlace will launch at full scale later this year. When the program is out of beta testing, she said, Michaels will use paid social marketing to bring more sellers into the fold.

• Michaels will evaluate metrics such as conversions, sales, search relevancy, and breadth and depth of its assortment to determine the program’s success.
• Bennett said Michaels now has an advantage over competitors like Jo-Ann, Etsy, and Hobby Lobby because it now provides a creative outlet for sellers, who are offered a trial period and don’t have to pay listing fees.
• Michaels’s new tagline—“Everything to Create Anything”—underscores the vision of being a place where creatives can buy and sell almost anything and have Michaels be part of the process, Bennett explained.

“What ultimately Michaels was trying to do is called ‘fix the fundamentals’ while we’re transforming for the future, and that has been our strategy for the past few years,” Bennett said. “We have really put the things in place that are going to set the tone for the next 10 years, 15 years, 20 years.”

Zoom out: Michael’s needed a new vision for the company in part because its competitors are also extending into new areas to capture the DIY consumer. This year, Etsy launched a wedding and baby registry platform in the aftermath of Bed Bath & Beyond’s bankruptcy and closure.

• Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said last month that Gen Zers are the company’s fastest growing cohort of customers and are “more deeply” engaging with the brand than other generations.
• Michaels also introduced a third-party marketplace earlier that allows vetted sellers to sell alongside Michaels’ products on its e-commerce website. As a result, Michaels has been able to increase its SKU count from 250,000 to 1.3 million.

Bennett said she believes Michaels’s physical store footprint gives it a leg up from its digital-only competitors.

“Longer term, we want to be able to incorporate MakerPlace items potentially in the store—just make this a more seamless process—because it’s such a competitive advantage for us to have an in-store presence,” she said.