How big is the cake of handmade crafts market?

Like the etsy. I noticed that it has been profitable for years. many users sell handmade carfts on it.

I'm living in China now and I want to build a ecommerce website to sell some chinese handmade crafts to some foreign country (like the US). thease crafts come from folk and it's the intelligence gathering of the people.

how about this idea? build a craft ecommerce sites like Etsy will profitable? how big is teh marketplace? how to do marketing?

thanks.

robinshe,

Tricky question because foreign sales of crafts -to- the US is difficult to measure. What is available is a profile of craft industry in the US, which at least offers a view of the landscape onto which you are stepping. Take a look at this breakdown of the crafts industry in the US - http://www.codacraft.org/dnn/CodaSurvey/NationalSummary/tabid/117/Default.aspx An example of the info this offers - you'll quickly see that glass and metal crafts dominate sales. Obviously a startup would want to consider this if breaking into the US market.

Note this is internal figures only - it does not show the value of sales to the US by a foreign source. (It's a huge market, by the way.)

Hope that helps.

Edit: Here's a report from 2003 that does show imports by country of cultural goods. http://www.uis.unesco.org/template/pdf/cscl/IntlFlows_EN.pdf See especially pages 15-27. US was importing in excess of $1Bn per year at that time.