The tale of The Happy Shell started unexpectedly in 2019 with a trip to the theatre. It was our eagerly anticipated annual trip to see the pantomime, the highlight of the festive season for my mum and me. Before the show, we met an enthusiastic young man who regaled us with a fabulous story about the wonders of Etsy. He had recently opened a shop and was making £200 per week. At this point, I was an unemployed accountant, staying with my parents and living off my savings. With COVID-19 threatening to hit the country and companies not hiring, I thought £200 a week sounded pretty damn good.
Having potters for parents, I already knew what Etsy was, but I was completely unaware that you didn’t necessarily need to be a budding artist to open a shop, and just like that, the obsession began!
As soon as we returned from the theatre, I began researching. Now, I must use the word “research” lightly, because by this point, I was two wines in and extremely over-excited. I needed to decide what I could make that required very little skill, creativity or natural talent - us accountants are rarely known for our artistic ability!
During my studies, I was taught effective planning and preparation are extremely important parts of starting any new businesses. What’s that saying? “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” I could not agree more!
However, back on this momentous evening, my market research took all of five minutes and consisted of me going into Google Trends and looking at the current high-trending items. The first thing that came was ‘knitting kits’. Well, that was that; I was going to make knitting kits and sell them on Etsy. The fact that I couldn’t knit and had zero interest in woollen crafts was of no concern to me.
I went onto Etsy and searched for the bestselling knitting kits. Thousands of results come up, and I begin scrolling through the beautiful kits and creations. Most were kits to knit impressive garments and stuffed animals. The people who put these together clearly had some serious talent, and there was no way I could compete with them. Mine needed to be much simpler as I didn’t have time to learn how to make such impressive items, let alone put together instructions for other people to make them. I decided that I would put together a simple beginner knitting kit for people to learn the basic stitches and knit themselves a scarf or square or something basic. I made a list of what I needed: wool, knitting needles, boxes and card paper. The very next day, I hit the shops, and one week later, my knitting shop was born!
I could not even begin to describe the excitement I felt when I launched my shop. The anticipation was killing me. I barely slept that night and woke up many times, checking how many sales I had had… zero was the answer! Imagine a tumbleweed floating across the screen. The following day I was disheartened and deflated. Where were my sales?
The next day I decided to learn everything I could about effective SEO and how to optimise my listing to get a better search ranking on Etsy. I won’t bore you with the details of what I learnt (I will save that for another post), but it was absolutely fascinating. I spent hours watching YouTube videos and taking points from the Etsy selling experts. I signed up for a site called Erank which allowed me to see what tags the competition was using, and I set about updating my listing with my newfound understanding and appreciation for the Etsy algorithm.
Once again, I barely slept and spent the night drifting in and out of dreams of sales and fortunes. Having left my phone and laptop in the other room to prevent me from checking for sales throughout the night, I leapt out of bed and ran to the other room to see how many sales I had had in the night. Once again, the answer was a big fat zero!
I asked my mum, who has daily Etsy sales of her pottery (albeit a hell of a lot better than my knitting kit and an actual piece of artwork), “what am I doing wrong?”. Mum’s advice, like most mothers, was “Michelle, you just need to be patient”. I am many things, but patient is not one of them. Telling an inpatient person to just be patient is the equivalent of telling someone mid-panic attack not to panic. Impossible. So I agreed to stop obsessing over my Etsy shop and to try to be patient. They were probably just fed up of hearing me talking about it. Another day passed, followed by another and another. By the time we got to five days since the opening of my Etsy shop, and just at the moment I had stopped thinking about it… ’KA-CHING!’
A sale! I got a sale! I was so excited I leapt out of my chair. Somebody wanted to buy my knitting kit! MY KNITTING KIT! I couldn’t quite believe it. The excitement I felt in that moment was nothing dissimilar to the feeling of being a child on Christmas morning, realising that Santa had come. There was no time to waste; I went straight into my room to assemble the knitting kit for my first-ever customer and prepare it for the post office the very next morning. I carefully wrapped the wool in a colourful ribbon and neatly cut the instruction card. I wanted to ensure my first-ever knitting kit for my maiden customer was going to be perfect. Just then, in a moment of pure bliss, when life simply couldn’t get any better than this… KA-CHING, it happened again!
At this point, you may be wondering what knitting kits have to do with templates and spreadsheets. Knitting kits was simply the start for me and my Etsy journey. It’s where my learning (and my obsession) began. Since then, I have explored different avenues, including passive income with digital products (my spreadsheets), artwork (which was unsuccessful due to my aforementioned lack of artistic ability) and even dropshipping through sites like Printify.
I have had many successes and many failures over the past few years, and I intend to share each and every one of them with you in my upcoming blog posts
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HUSSLE AT HOME SELLING ON ETSY GUIDE