I didn’t quit when Etsy Wholesale closed down

Despite the fact that I was an “artsy” kid growing up, I never imagined that I would build a business one day around handmade goods. In fact, I started my own jewelry brand during graduate school simply because my husband told me that if I wanted to keep making stuff for my little hobby blog, it needed to pay for itself. Don’t be too hard on him, grad school pay is legitimately terrible and I think we all know how easy it is to spend more than we thought we would at the bead store. 

Armed with zero knowledge of how to actually start or run a handmade business and a handful of photos from a few of the DIY tutorials I had created for my blog, I set up an Etsy shop over the course of a weekend. So simple. Time to just kick back my heels and wait for the orders and money to roll in, right? Not exactly. I did make a few sales in the first couple of months, but there was a TON I still had to learn about running a handmade business, and even more about making it profitable. 

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