Henriquez, 27, who lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said orders to her Etsy store LittleLadyAHomemade for her handmade masks plunged more than 70% the day after the US Centers for Disease Control & Prevention announcement on May 13. The agency said that people fully vaccinated against Covid-19 do not need to wear masks or practice social distancing indoors or outdoors, except under certain circumstances.
“The market just dropped,” she said. “I had a phenomenal last year in sales. Now what? Where do we go from here?”
Last year, the pandemic turned face masks into a wardrobe staple. Sellers big and small benefited from the trend. Etsy said cloth masks had erupted into the hottest new product category on its platform last summer. In August, the company said 110,000 sellers on its marketplace had sold as many as 29 million face masks, totaling $346 million.
The boom may be coming to an end. In early May, Etsy said in an annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the face mask market was poised to soften, noting that it had seen “demand for certain items, like handmade masks, diminish significantly with the rollout of the vaccine.”
Now, sellers like Henriquez, who spent the past year investing more than $150,000 in her mask business, are trying to figure out how to successfully pivot.
When Henriquez launched her Etsy store in 2018, she focused on selling baby items like quilts and handmade stuffed animals. With the pandemic, she saw an…
