Jauretsi

eBay was looking to market their enormous e-commerce platform to a whole new audience, targeting fashion-savvy and creative types. During these years, the platform of the moment was Tumblr, which was also one of the social channels I enjoyed the most. After several meetings with the leadership at Tumblr and eBay, we welcomed the birth of this new creation, The Inside Source, hosted on Tumblr itself. For three years, I found it quite meditative sifting through eBay’s closet in order to find that right product to enhance their storyline through this boutique initiative to show-off its finer things.

Cited as one of “12 Terrific Tumblr’s” for Brand Inspiration… “The Inside Source is an excellent lifestyle blog, looking at interesting eBay user’s equally interesting items for sale” — eConsultancy.com

As the official Editor-in-Chief of the website, the challenge was not necessarily finding good product (there is plenty of good products on eBay), but rather it was trickier to find good photography on the site. Eventually, our small team developed a budget to shoot original content, and cover events such as Fashion Week and Music Festivals, capturing street style and personal stories of notable eBay fans — from top stylists to respected architects to top chefs. The entire platform was a worthy experiment — one that brought lots of eyeballs, showcased eBay in a new light, and garnered high fashion press with some of our programs and live events.

Ultimately, I curated the eBay content posts with a healthy mix of vintage one-of-a-kind gems, to spanking new products (most people do not realize that more than half of eBay’s products are not vintage, but rather new products). It was important that we illustrated this messaging through the editorial.

Home

Photography

After the first year, we decided to relaunch the Tumblr with a new layout — crisp and clean layout, with navigation leading readers into several categories of eBays’ strengths. These include, but are not limited to…

Gadgets

Books (“First Editions” for sale)

Vintage Posters

Travel & Outdoors

Music

eBay enjoyed The Inside Source as a vehicle to reach a certain audience of sophisticated buyers and sellers, utilizing the platform (built on a Tumblr) for special announcements such as celebrity auctions promoted from the mothership eBay website, to promoting high-end partnerships with Sotheby’s art auctions. By 2017, eBay decided to transform the platform we had built over three years, to simply rebrand it as the general eBay Tumblr (thereby removing the title The Inside Source, and treating it as any other social channel).

The temporary project of The Inside Source received good reviews, namely by eConsultancy.com, listing it as one of “12 Terrific Tumblr’s for Brand Inspiration” and writes that “The Inside Source is an excellent lifestyle blog, looking at interesting eBay user’s equally interesting items for sale”. They continue: “The Tumblr is very well maintained with four or five posts every day, each one with huge and attractive images”. A deeper review highlights the overall eBay social ecosystem.