SEO Werkt!

Etsy, the uber-cool marketplace for all things handmade and vintage, has put its intricately crocheted foot down: no more selling body parts. Or bodily fluids. Hair and teeth, however, are still allowed.

The eBay for unique goods marketplace has grown dramatically recently, pulling in $525 million in sales last year. When startups grow, challenges are inevitable, and one of them is ensuring that the company’s culture and vision survive.

Source: Etsy

Charming “Human Teeth Bracelet,” by Deathany97

So Etsy laid down the law this past week, updating its prohibited items list.

Definitely out are skulls, bones, skeletons, and bodily fluids. Preserved tissues or organs are verboten too, so that freakishly awesome white devil scalp you inherited from your ancestors will just have to stay in the family a little longer.

Teeth continue to be kosher however, so you will still be able to purchase this tasteful Human Teeth Bracelet from the cheerfully-named up-and-coming artiste Deathany97.

For some reason, drugs are also not something Etsy wants to sell. (Probably a non-compete contract with stealth-mode South American entrepreneurs.)

That includes drug paraphernalia such as hash skillets and tobacco products. But tobacco pipes are still allowed, provided they do not have carburetors.

(Google helpfully informed me that a pipe carburetor has absolutely nothing to do with a internal combustion engine.)

Speaking of which, Etsy does not want to sell your motor vehicle, boat, or RV. And hazardous materials such as mercury, matches, and lighter fluid are out too.

Cool cat nap his-and-hers pillowcases? Still absolutely and defiantly in.

Source: Etsy

His-and-hers cat nap pillowcases

Image credit: DM7/ShutterStock

Filed under: offBeat, social, VentureBeat

You know that frustrating feeling when you order clothes online and they fit really poorly, like the target demographic is some weird mix of Kim Kardashian and Yao Ming?

Vastrm, a Y Combinator summer 2012 company founded by Jonathan Tang, hopes to give you the perfect, customized fit, starting with polo shirts.

Tang came up with the idea for Vastrm, which is a Sanskrit word for cloth, when a customer told him he had purchased a perfect shirt in Italy and has never been able to find the same fit again. He was considering flying back to Italy to track the shirt maker down, but Jonathan managed to adjust Vastrm shirts to the same fit.

“If you could simply order online (like music and books) and ensure you are getting the right fit, e-commerce sites would probably sell a lot more product and get a lot less returns,” Tang says.

While a number of companies, like BleuFlamme, J. Hilburn and Blank Label, offer very similar services for dress shirts, Vastrm focuses exclusively (for now) on polo shirts, targeting golfers and corporate clients.

You can go on Vastrm’s site and take a short quiz, entering height, weight, body type and waist size, to “optimize size selection.” Vastrm has an algorithm that recommends 2-3 of their fit types (slim, sport and relaxed) to suit your body type. The company then ships you a few sample polos for free to try on.

Once you know your fit, you can go online and make any other size adjustments you want. Tang says they mostly receive adjustments to add or subtract an inch or so from the shirt and sleeve length, but are capable of doing far more alterations. Vastrm saves your fit so you don’t have to do the measuring process every time you want a shirt.

You can then select the fabric and different styles for the collar, cuff, pocket, vent, buttons and even an optional golf tee pocket. After you finalize your order, you’ll get your customized polo in about three weeks.

The company also gives you a few suggested shirts in case you’re overwhelmed by all the options. Sadly, there’s no Shooter McGavin look, though (I checked). Tang tells me they are just doing polos for now, but expects to expand to long-sleeve polos, henleys, t-shirts and more in the next six-twelve months.

Tang showed me the process in our San Francisco office and I’ve got to say, I’m impressed. The prices aren’t cheap, but they aren’t ridiculous especially given what other companies in the space charge, and the customization is very cool. Waiting three weeks for the shirt is the biggest negative to me, but luckily it’s always golfing weather in Palo Alto.

If ultrasonic baby pictures aren’t enough, how about a resin-cast 3D model of your live fetus floating in clear lucite? An Ebisu health clinic, Hiro-o Ladies, is working with a 3D printer called Fasotec to create Tenshi no Katachi – Shape Of An Angel – so the entire family can see what that squirt is doing in your womb.

A company representative waxed all things baby love: “We actually got three expectant mothers to try this out. They said it felt great to see how their babies looked before birth, and to be able to actually hold the inside of their own body. They also enjoyed looking at the model after giving birth, thinking, ‘This is how my baby looked inside me’ and recalling how it felt to be pregnant.”

The service costs 100,000 yen (about $1300) and uses a dual-resin extruder to make the baby part and the solidified amniotic part at the same time. You can build the baby in multiple sizes and shapes and you can, using 3D imaging, focus on the whole body or just the face. You can even get little cellphone fobs with your baby floating inside of them. Seriously.

via Daddytypes

Bodymetrics is announcing today a new service that allows you to get your body mapped exactly so that you can have much better-fitting clothes when you go shopping at physical retail stores. The body scan can tell much more accurately if you’re really a certain size or not. It’s an example of how body-scanning technology can be applied to commerce in a way that hopefully transforms the shopping experience.

London-based Bodymetrics uses Kinect for Windows technology (the same kind of motion-sensors used in Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console). The 16 sensors can capture objects in a 3D space and convert them into digital data, showing the exact shape of your body and how clothes could fit on it.

The company is now installing Bodymetrics Pods (pictured above) at retailers. The first permanent pod will be at the Bloomingdale’s department store at the Stanford Shopping Mall in Palo Alto, Calif., or the heart of Silicon Valley. (A pilot pod was created for the Bloomingdale’s store in Century City in Los Angeles in March).The idea is to take the friction out of shopping by getting consumers clothes that fit.

They can now create a Bodymetrics account inside a store, get their body precisely measured, and get access to this data from any mobile device or PC.They can then continue their shopping experience in either physical or digital stores. Right now, only about 11 percent of apparel sale take place online, since many customers can’t assess properly whether clothes will fit them or not. Returns to retailers can be as high as 40 percent, due to poor fits. Bodymetrics hopes to reduce the percentage of returns.

Bodymetrics was founded in 2000 as a spin-off from research developed the University College London. It now has 20 employees. Investors include TAL Group and Suran Goonatilake, the founder of the company. Bodymetrics has raised $8 million to date. Rivals include True Fit, Meality, and Fitted Fashion.

But Bodymetrics says it has had a five-year track record at the Selfridges store in London, where it accounts for 20 percent of Selfridges sale of denim.

Filed under: VentureBeat

People are forever looking for convenient ways to achieve a slimmer figure – something that startups such as Thinnerview and WeightNag can attest to. However, French perfume-maker Velds has now come up with the first fragrance that aids weight loss in the form of PRENDS-MOI.

Designed at the Parisian perfume house Robertet, the product contains a ‘feel-good’ chemical that creates a sense of pleasure and wellbeing in the wearer, according to the company, which reduces stress and hinders compulsive eating habits. The main ingredient in PRENDS-MOI is Betaphroline, which reacts with keratinocyte cells in the skin to release beta-endorphins that aid positive emotions. The fragrance also uses caffeine, carnitine and spirulina extract to activate enzymes involved in the breaking down of fat in the body. The company suggests rubbing the perfume onto the areas of the body that the wearer wants to slim for the best effect. As well as providing therapy for slimmers, the fragrance was also designed to offer an attractive odour, with notes of “bergamot, jasmine, ylang-ylang and freshly picked lilac”. One 100ml bottle is priced at EUR 42.

While the jury may be out on how effective the product is at helping its users lose weight, the company claims some 75 percent of women who used the perfume for 28 days said it limited their urges to snack.

Website: www.velds.fr
Contact: www.velds.fr/en/contact.html

This guest post is by Anne-Sophie Reinhardt of aMINDmedia.

We all know this dream: you’re walking down the street, wondering why everybody is laughing, snickering and pointing at you. You look down and notice you’re naked. The shame that washes over you is immeasurable. Everybody saw you. All of you. The parts you’re extremely insecure about, the parts that you’ve always tried to hide, and the parts you hate and would do anything to get rid of. You’re revealing it all.

Blogging tends to feel that way too.

You put yourself out there. You write from the heart. You try to get real. You’re basically repeating that nightmare, with the only difference being intentionally telling people to look.

People will read it. People will discuss it and they will criticize it.

Putting yourself out there makes you vulnerable. It makes you attackable. It’s like taking the defenses down in the biggest battle of your life. It often feels counterintuitive. However, once you become completely authentic, you’re blogging success is practically guaranteed.

There’s only one unknown barrier: your self image.

How hating yourself ruins your career

I hated my body, but most people—at least secretly—have something about themselves that they hate. So in the following discussion, feel free to substitute your secret hate for the word “body.”

Hating your body means having a lot of inhibitions. When you feel constraint by your physical appearance, writing about things in your life that aren’t perfect or may cause some controversy is brutal.

However, that’s exactly what readers want to read. They don’t want you to make them feel bad about themselves because you’re such a flawless human being and have your life all perfectly lined up. They want to read about your struggles, your challenges, weaknesses and maybe even your problems. That’s what makes you interesting and will keep readers returning to your site.

Being ashamed of your body is a telltale sign of having no self-confidence. Readers notice that right away. Sure, you can always fake confidence to a point, but when it’s real, it shines through every word you put on a piece of digital paper.

The time you spend worrying about the way you look, hating certain body parts or wishing your next diet will forever liberate you from these limiting thoughts is time you can use much more wisely. Just think of how many hours you waste that you could use proactively working on new blog posts, strategically planning guest posts or working on new ideas. The possibilities that will present themselves are endless and thrilling.

Tapping into your emotions when feeling insecure about yourself is almost impossible when you hate some aspect of yourself, but that is an integral part of successful blogging. People are moved by emotions and they want to read about them. Some of the most successful blog posts ever written focused on stirring up feelings in the readers in order to influence them to comment on and share your content.

Overall, your dislike for yourself hinders your blogging career in more ways than you can imagine—and I speak from personal experience.

How hating myself almost cost me my life … and how I saved myself

I was ten years old when I turned against myself and my body. The pressure of living with a brother who was mentally and physically abusing me finally broke me.

I had been too strong for too long, but now I needed relief and I found it in obsessing over my body. I blamed my body for everything: the beatings, the spitting, the screaming and the sheer terror of my brother’s presence.

I didn’t like a single thing about myself. My belly was too big, my thighs were disgusting, my face was fat, my legs and arms too short and my fingers round like sausages.

So, I tried to fix my life by fixing my body. Instead, I almost died.

I started a diet that quickly led into anorexia nervosa. I was miserable, depressed and hoped that shedding more weight would finally make me happy again. The insecurity was eating at me and was slowly but determinedly killing the once vibrant, creative and confident little girl.

I started retreating into myself, losing all my friends, too weak to engage in social activities. I sobbed on the way to my three– to four–hour workouts because I was so weak my feet were hardly carrying me.

I fainted several times because of malnutrition. I stole laxatives from my mom’s pharmacy. I told hundred of lies in order to protect my addiction. I tried to commit suicide in order to escape this disgusting body.

I went through nothing short of hell.

When I woke up after 14 years, it was almost too late. It was then that I faced an even bigger struggle than I had been fighting for most of my life: I needed to make peace with the body I was given.

Make peace with yourself

How did I make peace with myself?

I started to transform my thoughts from negative ones into purely positive ones.

I started to sit up straight and walk with a head held high. I started to strategically work with the mirror and only focus on the parts of my body I liked. I started to express my feelings in healthy ways instead of simply translating emotions into feeling fat. I started to readjust my values in life and put my body in perspective.

All of these actions helped me become more confident, and as a result, my writing improved drastically.

Now I am not ashamed of my emotions. Now I am not hiding my brilliance behind self-hatred. Now I am not shying away from spending hours upon hours in my office doing nothing but writing. Now I am not enveloped in a cloud of misery, but giddy with excitement about every day that I am given.

I wish I hadn’t wasted so much of my life by despising my natural self. I could have advanced in many areas of my work where I put a serious limit to what I could achieve by simply portraying how uncomfortable I really felt. However, now that I am in love with my body, I am ready to change the world with confidence, drive and a welcomed lack of limiting thoughts.

And the best thing is if I can do it, so can you. In the end only one thing matters: taking action.

If I was able to radically change my self image, you can write that epic blog post.

If I was able to overcome a deadly disorder, you can improve your craft.

If I can use my past for something good, you can put a dent in the world.

If I can embrace life with the excitement of a toddler getting a new toy, you can start following your dreams.

Don’t let your self image stop you from making your life and your work matter. Don’t give your poor self perception the power to determine your career. Don’t hide your greatness behind a layer of self-hatred and doubt and let your life’s work remain hidden for the rest of your life.

Take advantage of the freedom and the possibilities we have in this world, act upon them and by all means, let the world take a close look at the bright shining star you are.

Anne-Sophie Reinhardt is an anorexia survivor, body image expert and the owner of aMINDmedia. She empowers you to achieve a healthier and more successful life by returning to your true purpose and values.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Is Your Self-perception Killing Your Blog?

If a health insurance rebate check arrived in your mailbox this week, how about putting it towards your health? The checks are part of the Affordable Care Act, which requires insurers to pay out if they don’t spend a certain amount of the premiums they collected towards paying for actual care. Rather than blow the money on apps, fast food, and other ephemera, why not reinvest the money in one of these 10 body- and mind-improving endeavors? Hell, if enough of us use the money to stay healthy, maybe we’ll get even bigger checks next year… More »

If a health insurance rebate check arrived in your mailbox this week, how about putting it towards your health? The checks are part of the Affordable Care Act, which requires insurers to pay out if they don’t spend a certain amount of the premiums they collected towards paying for actual care. Rather than blow the money on apps, fast food, and other ephemera, why not reinvest the money in one of these 10 body- and mind-improving endeavors? Hell, if enough of us use the money to stay healthy, maybe we’ll get even bigger checks next year… More »