Facebook Marketplace helps drive 50% of our sales

Our business name might seem a little odd at first, but once you know our story it's a name you won't forget. Our "Beautiful Fight" began before we even opened our business. In 2012, at the age of 21, I was diagnosed with a very rare spinal cancer, Epithelioid Hemangioendothelioma, paralyzing me from the waist down. I was the 51st person in the world diagnosed with this type of cancer in the spine. I always told my mom I would be in the top percentile, but I never expected this! I had emergency surgery and I prepared to leave the hospital in a wheelchair. 

We all “battle” something and I had to make a choice to see beauty in that fight, regardless of how dark and trying it was. So our “Beautiful Fight” started at that moment. After months of physical therapy and radiation I regained the ability to walk and even finished my final semester of college that fall. 

Fast forward to 2015, my wife Heather and I were on vacation with my family and we got into a car accident. Luckily it wasn't too major and everyone walked away seemingly fine, but my body isn't like everyone else. During my battle with cancer they removed my T7-T9 creating a new spinal column with rods and screws. The car accident suppressed the lumbar section of my spine exasperating all of the issues I dealt with, and some that I overcame during my cancer battle. I had extreme nerve pain, Drop Foot in my right leg that limited my ability to walk, and I lost over 50 percent of the sensation from the waist down. Heather and I patiently waited for months as the doctors told us to “wait and see” as my body would be healing slower than the average person, but nothing was changing. 

At the time I was working with individuals on the Autism spectrum, some of them with aggressive behaviors that put my body at risk. I ended up no longer being able to fulfill my job duties and I was asked to resign. I can't put into words how absolutely crushed and meaningless I felt at that time. We needed to pay the bills, and I also needed to create something as that was always a form of therapy for me. I couldn't just keep sitting at home feeling like my life was given back to me just to be taken away again. Heather showed me a few pallet signs for sale in our area on Facebook Marketplace, and it was like someone flipped a switch. I said, "Those are super easy to make. We just need a saw."

My wife and I had about $85 to our name at the time, so we borrowed my dad's drill, bought a discount Miter saw at Harbor Freight and three pine boards. We sold our first two signs within a few days on Marketplace. After we sold a few pallet signs we used that money to buy more materials and tried to make a coffee table. I mean a pallet sign is just like the top of a coffee table, right?! Before we knew it I was building what my body would allow and as soon as Heather was home we were in the garage building tables. We slowly built up our skills as we continued to grow. With a little help from trusting customers we tried our hands at new skills and new designs pushing ourselves farther than we ever expected. 

Beautiful Fight Woodworking has now served over 3,500 customers in all 48 continental states. We have been blessed with such incredible growth over the years as we’ve doubled our sales from year to year since opening in 2015. Now we not only build a huge variety of items, but we also have the pleasure of teaching others how to create with our DIY Create and Take Classes throughout Missouri.

Starting the Business

Heather and I always half joked around about how fun it would be to start a business, but we never expected it to be a woodworking business or that it would grow at such a fast pace. For the first couple of months we were so focused on paying the bills that it took us a little bit to see the full potential of this idea. We were drawn to Facebook Marketplace for that exact reason, it allowed us to post items for sale without any cost at all! We would build an item, post it on Marketplace, sell it within a week, and we often had custom orders placed for us to remake a table similar to what just sold. 

We got to a point that my body couldn't keep up with the increase in orders. Heather was basically working two full-time jobs. She’d would work at her day job and immediately come home and start finishing the projects I couldn't do alone. We decided that as soon as we had enough orders/sales to match her current salary, we would take the leap of faith and do this full time. We were incredibly lucky to be able to start up our business from our garage, saving us a lot of typical startup costs. We kept our focus solely on Facebook to keep all of our costs as low as possible. We’d heard it could take 3 - 4 months to get your first sale on Etsy. 

Growing through Facebook Marketplace

After we had a few repeat customers it seemed like a no-brainer to launch a Facebook Business Page; our business name seemed all too fitting as we were trying to find the beauty in the darkness once again. We continued to post ready-made items on Marketplace and we would add our Facebook Page link to the Marketplace listing. 

This really opened up the doors for custom orders and customers seeing us more as a legitimate business. One of the main reasons we were drawn to opening a business was the sense of community and wanting to contribute to that community which was supporting us so well. I absolutely love that selling through Facebook and Facebook Marketplace allows people to get to know the people and story behind the business in such a personal way. Although Etsy provides a small space to share a business’ story, it doesn't allow a shop to stand out or have the same personal engagement with customers like we’ve found on Marketplace. I truly believe that aspect of personal transparency and connection greatly contributed to our growth over the years.

We did have a lot of successful Etsy sales once we opened our Etsy shop in 2018, but those all came at a cost that Facebook did not have and it seemed to really miss our local market. With Facebook we are able to target our sales to our local community and within a radius where we can deliver. Facebook Marketplace always accounted for 50 percent or more of our sales, even during our two years of over $100,000 sales on Etsy. The fees and inability to make our shop stand out is really what led us to close our Etsy store last summer and focus our online efforts on Facebook and our own website. When a customer comes to our Facebook Page they are able to see a variety of our work while also getting to know the women behind the power tools. They also get to explore our work without seeing competitors' work featured on the same page, which is what happens on Etsy. 

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