February 1, 2022
So 2020 was a hard year for...basically the whole wide world. It was a mind reset of the unexpected and we all had to figure out what to do.
As mentally unsettling the year was, I decided to pursue an opportunity with all the time I had at my disposal. Open up an Etsy shop and sell stickers. An easy statement to say, a difficult one to execute.
I didn’t really know how much time and effort it would take, much less the details of running a business. Because that’s what an Etsy shop is, a business.
I’ve had a total of 26 sales since 2020 and it’s 2022. Growth pretty much plateaued and then halted by the time I got to 2021.
I could say that the algorithm didn’t work for me, or there are already ton of people out there doing the same thing I am. I think both of these statements are true, but the biggest factor is, I didn’t put in the proper effort.
It being 2022 now I had to figure out what I was going to do with this shop: keep going, close it....or rethink it. I decided to chose the third option.
The biggest drawbacks for me from my first attempt were:
Having a shop to me meant I needed to have something scalable. I couldn’t rely on random ideas for stickers to pop into my head out of nowhere and know whether or not they’d work in the shop. There also wasn’t a consistent theme with my work. Branding wise, it was pretty disjointed. If I wanted to release something new, I didn’t have a backlog of ideas or next iterations.
An epiphany happened recently I was able to find a way to combine a lot of my favorite things into one. This shop happens to be the avenue to express that. I know the effort and logistics I’ll need to put into this and this second chance levels my expectations. Will this second idea be successful? I don’t know, but I’m at peace with it because I genuinely feel like this idea has a clearer path than what I was doing before.
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