I never set out to build a half-million dollar Etsy business

I never set out to grow a half a million-dollar business. In fact, when I started my Etsy shop back in 2012, I had a one-year-old and was six months pregnant and mostly just looking for something that would give me a challenge and mental break from full-time mom mode while also bringing in some ambiguous amount of income that would make it worthwhile. 

You see, I’ve never really been a “creative.” Sure, I dabble in creative things every now and then, but I’m not someone that was always crafting or DIYing projects. My journey to becoming an Etsy seller looked a little different than a lot of people, as I didn’t have a hobby craft that I started to sell. Rather, I taught myself a skill that I knew was in demand, and I set out to sell products online to make some money from home.

In the summer of 2012, I bought a used embroidery machine at a yard sale and I quickly got to work teaching myself how to applique and monogram. I focused on baby items because that was the season of life I was in, and I knew there was a demand on Etsy for baby products. I sat at the desk in the corner of my bedroom and daydreamed about the day that I would “make it big” and my products would be in department stores alongside those big-name baby brands. But I didn’t really have any kind of plan or intentionality behind how I was going to get from using a yard sale embroidery machine to building a baby monogram empire.

About 2 - 3 months after I bought that machine, and many late nights making some really random creations as practice, I opened my shop, Funky Monkey Children, though I was woefully unprepared and frankly, unqualified to really be selling these products that I had only been making for a few months. I was excited, but also terrified — all those feelings of not being good enough, not having enough skill, and not knowing anything about running a business ran through my mind every time I told someone about the shop. 

A few days after I opened up shop, my very first sale came from a friend. I was equal parts excited and absolutely mortified that someone was actually going to buy my products. While I daydreamed about big things for my shop, the actual practical step of making my first order and shipping it to someone I knew was overwhelming.

“What if they hated what I made?”

What if they laughed about the terrible quality of my embroidery? What if they were embarrassed to give it away as a baby gift? 

But I plowed ahead, made it, and sent it out and tried to keep that negative internal dialogue at bay. At the very least, I figured that with enough practice my products would eventually improve and I would be more confident about their quality.

Within a few months, I was getting a few sales a week on Etsy, and I began to really see the potential of what this business could become. No longer was I content to have “date night money.” I wanted a more consistent income that was reliable enough that we could count on it in our monthly budget, and it could make an impact on our family.

I made the leap to purchase a six needle embroidery machine long before I really felt “ready” to take that jump, and definitely long before my husband was totally on board with the idea that this shop could actually go anywhere. But by increasing the capacity of what I could do, I no longer had to sit right next to my machine the entire time it was sewing, and I was able to increase the speed of production exponentially. This allowed me to get my products out faster than a lot of other sellers in my niche, which increased my sales by making my shop attractive to those last-minute shoppers who were frantically searching for a gift for a baby shower.

Within about a year of being on Etsy, I was having consistent sales and felt like things were rolling along. But I was hustling. I took all kinds of last-minute orders, I did every custom order that came my way, I was constantly on the search for new inventory or new products that I could offer in my shop, and I was always networking and brainstorming ways to market my shop both on and offline. I was exhausted and felt like my shop was beginning to take over my life. This little daydream about taking over the baby monogram world didn’t feel like it was panning out, but it wasn’t for lack of work and effort on my part. 

I ended up closing up shop for a while because I was incredibly burnt out, and didn’t feel like the amount of time I was putting into it was paying off financially. In fact, I could have made more money working a minimum wage job than I was making in my shop at this point. But it wasn’t really for a lack of sales. I had a pretty solid sales history and my shop was doing “well” from the outside looking in, but I was completely overwhelmed trying to juggle everything and feel the constant hustle to get my products out there and bring in buyers.

When I opened back up in the beginning of 2016, I knew there had to be a better way. It was physically impossible for me to continue to do all the things I had been doing to this point: the social media, the promotions, new products, etc. and I had now added another baby, so I knew that in order to be able to balance three kids under the age of four and a part-time shop, something had to change.

I began to really dive into the actions I was taking that were successfully moving the needle forward in my shop, and the actions I was taking that were keeping me busy without actually doing much for my end results.

I found that almost all of the off-site promotion that I was doing to bring traffic to my Etsy shop was ultimately a time-suck — allowing me to feel like I was “busy,” but not really doing anything for my sales and revenue. From then on out I decided I’d only put effort into the things that really made a difference, which was mastering Etsy search engine optimization (SEO) so that I could passively drive traffic to my shop without having to do any promotions, sales, marketing, or really anything other than the creation of my product and customer service to my buyer.

And that was the turning point in my shop like I never could have even imagined. I was able to let go of feeling like I had to be everywhere and do everything and focus on the things that ACTUALLY made my shop stand out: great customer service, quick shipping, and an understanding of SEO that allowed me to rank high in the search again and again. I went from stressed and burnt out to streamlining my shop so that I could work less than 10 hours a week and produce more products than I had when I was working full time. And more importantly, I was able to let go of that constant mental pressure to be doing the next thing for my shop to get more exposure.

I no longer had to worry about driving my own traffic to Etsy; I let Etsy do that for me, and honestly, they did a way better job than I had ever done with the paltry amount of traffic I was able to bring to my shop through all the myriad of marketing tricks I’d tried. 

Etsy has millions of buyers that are already on the platform, primed and ready to buy something as long as I could get my “something” in front of them, and by mastering the SEO of the platform I could stand out in the search results and have traffic coming into my shop all day and night without having to do the work on my part. This allowed me to focus on the parts of the business that I enjoyed: the creative aspects, the goal setting, and climbing toward the next milestone accomplishment of my business.

I still actively run my six-figure Etsy shop, and in addition to that, in the spring of 2018, I began coaching other women on building and scaling their Etsy shops. My big focus in coaching is to allow people to step back from the hustle and overwhelm and know that it is possible to run an extremely successful business without running yourself ragged, as long as you focus on those high impact activities (like SEO) and let go of the time-suck activities that keep you spinning your wheels. We focus on more revenue with less work, not keeping ourselves busy with a million “business things” all the time.

The biggest reward for me is when I have a student tell me how relieved they are to let go of feeling like they have to do everything, and how much their sales have increased while they are doing LESS marketing work. Working with students to build their business into a meaningful income for their family without taking all their time away from their family in the process has been a new and exciting challenge for me, and I can’t wait to see what is in store for 2021 and beyond.

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