About Kroped
Kroped opened as an Etsy shop in June 2020, based out of Los Angeles, California! Kroped is pronounced just like “crop” in “crop top” because it started with a single artist selling canvas paintings trying to raise enough money to launch a line of crop tops in all sizes, FOR EVERYONE! Our message was this – no matter your sex, ethnicity, size, or sexuality you deserve to feel beautiful in a Kroped Top! After only one month, Kroped released its first shirt design, “The Girls Room”. 6 months later, we had over 20 live designs in sizes small-5x.
A few 3D printers later we expanded! Kroped is owned and operated by one person, you may already know me as Angel! I am the one responsible for all of the designing, finishing/painting, packing of orders, and everything in between! I’m also the same person running all of our socials and customer service! Kroped is everything to me and I am so grateful to be able to sell my art full-time and fund my dreams with it! To show my appreciation, each and every order is hand-packed and made to feel like a gift to you each and every time.
After four years as a company, Kroped looks very different than when it started! Kroped has now expanded to planters, keychains, necklaces, handmade home decor and most noticeably earrings! Our main goal now is to get pieces our customers will love forever across the entire globe. As of March 2023, Kroped has shipped to all 50 U.S States and over 20 international countries.
Starting in July of 2022, overseas manufacture giants like alibaba, temu and shein started selling knockoff versions of Kroped's original pieces on their sites. I fought each one as I found them, but when one would come down it felt like 4 more went up. Smaller businesses like boutiques and amazon store's started buying the knockoffs and reselling them as their own. Etsy shops that are drop selling jewelry from China were using images of me wearing my own art and marketing their drop shipped earrings as handmade. Right before the 2023 holiday season we put in extra hours to get as many of the counterfeits of my work removed from these sites before the season started and we would have no time to get them removed and in retaliation, these manufactures used VPN's to report Kroped's Etsy shop for selling mass produced items, which is against Etsy's TOS using my own pictures claiming for them to be theirs. Pictures of my face wearing my art. They mass reported our listings until our account was on the brink of being permanently banned. I personally went back and forth with Etsy seller support for months and after reinstating a few listings and admitting it was a mistake, they removed them again days later and since then have stood by and doubled down on Kroped's original art no longer being complacent with Etsy's TOS since mass produced items are not allowed on Etsy. Art that was stolen from Etsy and mass produced was no longer allowed on Etsy despite the numerous shops selling drop shipped knockoffs of my art as their own still being up. In the middle of December 2023 I made the decision to remove Kroped from Etsy. Longer explanation is on our Instagram reels or Tiktok, there are so many other details that really add to this story and after publicly speaking about it I quickly learned that I am not alone. This same thing has happened to hundreds, if not thousands of other small artists on Etsy. Alibaba steals our images from Etsy, creates cheap knockoffs and then uses our own pictures to sell poorly made versions and take down the small artist they originally stole from.
As for the future of Kroped, we’re looking to hire a crew and start booking more in person markets! We are not going anywhere and we have no plans of slowing down! You can check our instagram for information on our next in person shopping event! Thank you to anyone who has supported me! Please do not hesitate to reach out with any questions or concerns, I’m here!
-Angel