Etsy hip on Wall Street today

Etsy (ETSY) is certainly hip on Wall Street this morning.  Shares of the Brooklyn based online craft marketplace more than doubling from its IPO price of $16 dollars a pop.  Not too shabby for a company that warned in its filing that it may not be profitable.

Yahoo Finance Senior Columnist Michael Santoli is not surprised by Etsy’s disclosure.

“This is not about results…it’s not about really a powerful profit franchise at all,” Santoli notes.  “I think it’ll be an interesting test, this kind of economics that are being valued so highly in the private market right now. None of these private companies that have these huge valuations are necessarily turning out big profits or any profits at all.”

Etsy‘s net loss widened to $15.24 million in 2014 from $796,000 a year earlier.  However, sales jumped 56% to $195.6 million last year.

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The Brooklyn based online craft marketplace has more than 1.4 million active sellers and nearly 20 million buyers as of December. Etsy charges sellers a fee to list products and earns commission from each item sold on its site.

“Etsy wants be a little bit of a warm and fuzzy company. They want to embrace the people who sell on it…It was a kind of hipster name.  It was not hard core engineering high tech Silicon Valley guys. This is all about Brooklyn...I think people will think of it as a really stretch of back door way to play like a Pinterest type movement," Santoli says.

In staying with its roots, Etsy gave mom and pop investors a chance to buy shares of the company as well as a small number of institutions. Some of the company’s investors include Union Square Ventures and Accel Partners.

Etsy shares started trading on the Nasdaq today under the ticker “ETSY.”