A decade ago, on a brisk Tuesday in March, an elite group of New York antiques dealers held an emergency council of war. The enemy was 1stDibs. Most had once embraced the platform with open arms—it had made them money, widened their audiences, and, for some, acted as a stamp of legitimacy. But recent changes to the platform had proven so controversial that there was talk of a mass exit.
More changes would come. As 1stDibs shifted from a listings site to a transactional e-commerce platform, it was clamping down on a growing threat—shoppers contacting dealers and buying directly, thereby depriving the site of its commission. To fight it, the New York–based company removed sellers’ names from listings and started monitoring communication, redacting contact info. “It felt like doing business with the CIA,” a dealer once told me.
All of these moves were unpopular with sellers. But despite a series of meetings and a few desertions to competing platforms, no revolution materialized. What followed instead was an uneasy peace: Most sellers stayed, some grudgingly.
Speaking with dealers about their experience with 1stDibs can be an exercise in cognitive dissonance. Many will say that the platform makes up a sizable chunk of their revenue, and has allowed them to sell to celebrities halfway across the world. At the same time, they chafe at rule changes, and will commiserate over a sense that the platform is not listening to them. More than one has described 1stDibs as a dictatorship.
Bradford Shellhammer wants to change that. Roughly a year into his dual role as 1stDibs’s chief <a href="https://bitcomme.com/trafalgar-provides-travel-advisors-with-co-branded-digital-marketing/” title=”Trafalgar Provides Travel Advisors with Co-Branded Digital Marketing”>marketing officer and chief product officer, he has been pushing to reset the platform’s relationship with sellers. In doing so, he’s reversing some of the policies that kicked up so much agita 10 years ago—but taking a real risk in the process.
If you were to invent the ideal résumé for a C-suite role at 1stDibs, it would look a lot like Shellhammer’s. A graduate of the fashion design program at Parsons, he dabbled in decorating, wrote for Dwell, and did stints at both Design Within Reach and Blu Dot early in his career. Then an e-commerce startup that he co-founded, the digital marketplace Fab.com, took off and launched him into the tech world, leading to roles at eBay and Rent the Runway. He has spent time on both sides of the Silicon Valley–High Point Market divide.
Shellhammer is also a collector. When we spoke over Google Meet, he was in his upstate New York house, the walls behind him covered floor-to-ceiling in a dizzying array of prints. “I think there are 250 pieces of framed art on the walls in this room alone,” he told me. “It’s everything from Anni and Josef Albers to Etsy artists that I spent $10 on for a screen print.”
In conversation, Shellhammer is effusive, and does not come across as particularly corporate—cursing cheerfully and tackling difficult subjects directly. He described the controversial platform changes made a decade ago as adding friction “out of fear,” and was candid that 1stDibs had some healing to do with dealers.
“[Some sellers] felt like it was more about us than it was about them, which is not partnership,” hesays. “A lot of our policies and a lot of the way we talked about things were, ‘What’s good for 1stDibs?’ As opposed to ‘What’s good for 1stDibs and you?’”
Some sellers first became aware of Shellhammer in the midst of a minor dustup last year that followed a familiar pattern: 1stDibs rolled out an initiative designed to help buyers, then saw sellers protest. In this case, it was the addition of a price-estimating feature that gave shoppers an algorithmically generated suggestion of an item’s worth.
Though 1stDibs’s internal research showed that the tool increased conversion, many sellers—especially new product makers—disliked it for challenging perceptions of their own pricing. Some left the platform. But dealers appreciated that Shellhammer reached out directly to discuss the issue and seemed open to suggestions. The company ultimately scrapped the tool.
David Rosenwasser, co-founder of Rarify and a longtime vintage seller, has been pleasantly surprised by the shift in tone. “We spoke about some of my grievances historically with 1stDibs. I was shocked to hear both that he was very aware, and that he seems to feel it’s his job to go against all of the things that many dealers [don’t like] about 1stDibs. … [Sometimes it’s as simple as] feeling like you’re being listened to, and that you’re not the enemy.”
Shellhammer has gone from listening to acting: In recent months, 1stDibs has stopped redacting conversations between buyers and sellers. The site has also reintroduced vendor names to listings, so browsers can see who is selling each item. And the company is lowering its take rate on some categories—starting with jewelry, handbags and watches—in an effort to align its own margins with sellers’ and entice them to list more inventory.
These are only part of a bigger initiative, says Shellhammer, that will include a variety of additional changes large and small, ranging from fine-tuning the site’s uploading tools to giving sellers the ability to put their accounts in vacation mode to improving its shipping program—a longtime dealer pain point.
Maybe the most visible change is on social media, where 1stDibs is rolling out TikTok- and Instagram Reel–friendly videos in collaboration with dealers. “We are literally making content with our sellers—co-branded, talking about them, showing them, featuring them,” he says. “We have more plans to be more seller-centric in all of our marketing channels, not less. We wantpeople to discover these brands.”
It’s difficult to get an accurate temperature read on 1stDibs’s network of dealers—there are over 5,500 of them, and there’s no easy way to grab a mass opinion poll. In speaking with several, some certainly remained skeptical of the platform and were inclined to see these changes as purely cosmetic. (“A little underwhelming, to be honest,” said one.)
But there was a general sense that the recent changes were a move in the right direction. “For me, it represents a very positive step forward,”says James Thorpe of U.K.-based Royal House Antiques.“It demonstrates a greater level of trust between 1stDibs and its established dealers.”
Chicago-based dealer Lawrence Converso has had his ups and downs with the platform over the years—like many, he considered leaving in 2016—but he welcomes some of the shifts. “It’s good that 1stDibs is putting our names back,” he says. “Before anything leaves our warehouses, we do an extreme inspection and we wrap everything. … It’s important for people to see that, rather than thinking they’re buying it from someone in a garage.”
In Shellhammer’s telling, the changes are just good business. By policing interactions between buyers and sellers, he says, 1stDibs had complicated shopping and denigrated the user experience. Furthermore, the cloak-and-dagger secrecy around sellers is out of step with today’s consumer. It may also simply not be feasible. In 2016, using a Google Image search to research a product was a clever trick—now it’s just what people do.
“A younger buyer is trained to do research on a seller to understand everything about them,”he says, recalling an interior designer who complained about shipping rates after trying to buy Murano glass sconces on 1stDibs. When Shellhammer called her to apologize, a revelation emerged. “She said: ‘I thought the seller was shady, because they hide who they are on your platform.’ She’s like, ‘I want to go look up their Instagram.’ It was this epiphany for me that the expectation of the consumer is changing.”
Still, by making sellers visible, 1stDibs runs the risk of reopening an old can of worms: If buyers do business direct, the platform could lose its commission. On that note, it has also been stepping up enforcement in another area: pricing parity. Historically, sellers might have listed a piece on their own site at a discount, enticing buyers to do business directly—technically against 1stDibs rules, but it happens.
To combat this, the platform has developed AI-powered technology that allows it to police seller pricing more comprehensively. Shellhammer says the company wants to “come down hard” on bad actors. “If you’re going to sell something for a lower price somewhere else, that erodes trust for our customer. … Even the richest person in the world isn’t a fool—they’re not going to spend $2,000 more when they can get literally the exact same thing somewhere else.”
So there are carrots and sticks. But Shellhammer is quick to emphasize that the goal is a partnership with give-and-take. Buyers, he says, should want to shop on the platform because of the convenience and the guarantees it provides—not because it’s hard to find the seller. By the same token, he’s hoping sellers will work with 1stDibs because it delivers real value, not because of a contractual straitjacket.
“I think we need one another,” he says. “[1stDibs] needs [dealers] because of their eye and their commitment to authenticity. They need us because we bring a buyer to their business. We’ve got to figure out how it works for both of us.”
Though Shellhammer’s efforts seem to be generating some good vibes, they will likely be judged on whether they hit the bottom line. His bet is that by making sellers happier, they will list more goods and offer a better experience to buyers, leading to more shopping—a happy flywheel. If it works, any loss the company takes on lower commissions or off-platform shopping will be swallowed up by growth.
For 1stDibs itself, the stakes are real. Under longtime CEO David Rosenblatt, the platform has cut costs in recent years, but investors have not responded enthusiastically. Since the company’s IPO in 2021, its stock has dropped from an initial price of $20 down to the single digits, often trading below $5. Last quarter 1stDibs saw revenue growth and posted positive adjusted EBITDA—however, it has not had a profitable quarter by standard accounting measures since going public.
For dealers too, the moment has challenges. Like the rest of the home industry, many are still in the dregs of the post-boom hangover, waiting for the housing market to turn around. Premier sellers do fine, but there’s plenty of worry outside of the tippy-top tier. If 1stDibs doesn’t make sales for its dealers, having their names publicly listed won’t matter as much.
Indeed, despite all of the drama around policy shifts, there’s an argument that dealers are mostly staying on (or leaving) the platform on raw numbers alone. Venerable Manhattan gallery Bernd Goeckler Antiques left 1stDibs last year, but director Katja Hirche says the decision was a simple business move—not a reaction to rule changes. “I have no bad blood,” she says. “There was anger amongst dealers, but once I moved on, I moved on. But over the years, the sales that we did there declined. … If you [only] make one or two sales, it’s not really worth it. It was cost-prohibitive for how much effort we had to put in. It just fizzled.”
In other words, to truly transform 1stDibs’s relationships with sellers, Shellhammer needs to generate both good vibes and good revenue—no easy feat. “If Bradford is out of there in three years, it’s possible he will have made some delightful cultural changes that make the dealers feel better,” says Rosenwasser. “However, if he’s able to do that and somehow find ways of bringing in a lot more dealers, bring more business in and make the shareholders more money, he will be a wunderkind.”
