How I Make, Pack, & Ship Stickers (From Home)

I run a sticker shop now for a little over two years and I've had over 5 000 orders each one of these orders contains 48 individual stickers which means if you do the math I've made somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 000 individual stickers which is pretty insane to think about so as you can imagine I have a lot of experience with stickers and I think I've come up with some pretty efficient ways of making packing and shipping them so today I'm going to be talking about my process in hopes that it'll be helpful to you in some way let's get into it so first things first the actual making of the stickers this is really a three-part process which starts with setting up the files for printing on this particular day I have 15 Etsy orders and four Shopify orders to fulfill so the first thing I'll do is I'll head over to the computer where I have a bunch of template files saved with all the designs that I've made over the years for each order that I get I have to change the name the design and the colors according to what the customers want I put all of the designs and colors on different layers on my Illustrator files so it's just a matter of checking on and off the visibility of these layers and then adding the name at the end if you use Photoshop there's this feature called Data merge which can really speed up this process I think it uses a spreadsheet as input and it can really just automate everything that you need to do and change but as far as I know this isn't available on illustrator so if you know of a quicker way that can help me do this please let me know in the comments but anyways looking at the timer on my desk it looks like it only took about 20 minutes to do this so it doesn't take much time to prep these files at all next I'll head down to my mini print shop and start queuing all the files to the printers I'll also take this time to print out all the address labels for all of the orders for those I have two separate dymo label printers a smaller one to print envelope labels and a larger one to print labels for Parcels I'll talk more about that later after that I'll just let them print the bad thing about the printer that I have is that it prints pretty slow it takes about three and a half minutes per order which can really add up if you have a lot of orders but the good thing about it is that you can just let it run and do other stuff while it's printing Pro tip if you're using one of these printers that print onto a roll pick up one of these Cutters from Amazon they're really cheap to get and they make it so much easier to cut straight off of the Roll I have a bunch of these laying all around my shop and they're just so much easier to use versus a pair of scissors next up is laminating if you want super durable waterproof stickers that won't fade or scratch for years to come you need to laminate them there's a lot of different ways to do it but the easiest way that I found is to use a manual tabletop laminator I'll start by adding the film on top of the print and cutting it to size after that you just are peeling it on one side and then feed it through the rollers now that all the sheets are laminated the next step is to start cutting them using the graph tag if you guys are familiar with the silhouette or Cricket cutting machines this is like the same thing but on steroids it cuts super fast has a barcode reading system so you can queue up multiple jobs and best of all it has a feature called perf cutting this is a feature where the blade will go up and down while on a cut path leaving little tabs behind on the sheet the main benefit of this is that after everything is done cutting you can simply just pop off the orders right off of the sheet no extra trimming or cutting required this feature alone has just saved me a lot of time because I used to have to cut out these sheets manually and now this machine can do it so it's really great my packaging has really changed a lot from when I first started making stickers I used to use fancy envelopes washi tape extra stickers stuck all around the packaging but I found that not only did this add extra cost to the packaging itself but also the shipping costs when you're shipping in envelopes any extra way that you add onto the package can really make a big difference in what it costs to ship especially if you're shipping internationally while it's important to make the unboxing experience as nice as possible I feel like most people go overboard with it and it can sometimes be a little wasteful because all of this packaging gets thrown out eventually anyways so now for me I'm actually using a more minimalistic approach to my packaging all I use are regular envelopes and poly bags every order just includes the stickers themselves a freebie sheet and a thank you card and I package them together like this so now it's time to get to the actual packing to be honest I have kind of a love-hate relationship with repetitive tasks like this sometimes I do enjoy it because you can kind of just zone out and it's kind of like a therapeutic meditation but other times I'm just really dreading it so I'll have to put on Netflix or something on it in the background to help pass the time [Music] I get a lot of comments saying that shipping is one of the most stressful parts of running a shop for you guys and to be honest in the beginning I was pretty stressed out about it too but I feel like I've gotten things under control now after researching a bunch of options I think I've settled on three ways that really makes sense if you're shipping flat products like stickers greeting cards or even small prints the first way is stamps before email existed there's something that was just called letter mail and believe it or not you can still ship things this way today and it's cheap and it's relatively reliable and I say relatively reliable because there are going to be times where your letters are really delayed or just completely lost in the mail altogether but through my personal experience this happens just so infrequently that it's still worth it to ship this way if what you're selling is flat and fits in an envelope I think that you should at least offer letter mail as an option for your customers there's customers out there that just want the cheapest shipping possible and don't mind waiting to get it from my experience delivery time can vary pretty widely so I never guarantee a certain delivery date to my customer members if a customer really needs it by a certain date or just wants tracking I always tell them to upgrade to a shipping method that includes that which I'll talk about next on a side note if you're shipping a lot with stamps I highly recommend getting a postage meter this is a machine that has a scale that will weigh your envelopes for you and then automatically apply the correct amount of postage to each envelope in Canada using a postage meter will get you a discounted rate on shipping as well and it's just a lot easier than peeling and sticking stamps in general they're pretty easy to use all you have to do is put the envelope on the scale and then after it's read the way you put it into the slot to get stamped you can also change the destination from local to us to International shipping method number two is Chit Chats if you're Canadian you know how expensive it is to ship anything with a tracking number using Canada Post the last time I checked the starting cost for a package of small stickers like mine were somewhere between 15 to 20 dollars which is pretty crazy because that's more than I charge for a single order of stickers so with the cost that high it can be really hard to justify pushing that cost onto your customers what Chit Chats does is they take all of your packages and puts them in their own tracking system and then they drive them across the border in a truck and then shift them using USPS and somehow they're able to only charge six to eight dollars and still turn a profit it really makes you wonder what Canada Post is doing and what they're charging for because in a lot of instances Canada Post is both slower and more expensive than Chit Chats doing it this way the best thing about Chit Chats too is their software is pretty robust they have this feature where you can connect up your Etsy or Shopify store I think it works with eBay too and you can import all of your orders directly into the system and print out your labels from there it just makes it a lot quicker to do because you're not inputting addresses manually and this isn't a sponsored video or anything like that I just use them and I genuinely like them a lot I feel like they've saved me a lot of money over the years and the best thing is that it lets Canadian stores compete with us ones which is really great because actually most of my customers are from the US so there are times when customers will reach out to me and they need their stickers really fast like within one to two business days and for these situations I use net parcel net parcel is the cheapest way that I've found to ship within the US and Canada within one to two business days I don't know the reason why or how they're able to do this but shipping through net parcel allows you to get discounted raise with companies like FedEx UPS or DHL shipping stickers this way generally cost me around 20 to 25 Canadian dollars which might seem high but I found that when going directly with the shipping companies they were charging me anywhere between 40 to 50 dollars which is pretty crazy to ship a package all you do is sign up for an account fill out all the details for your package like dimensions and address and then after that you can print a shipping label and attach it to your package and then just drop it off at a carrier like FedEx or UPS they don't have any fancy software that will automatically import your orders from Etsy or Shopify but I feel like customers rarely upgrade to this option anyway so it's not that big of a deal and after that we're done fulfilling orders and and that's it for the video If you enjoyed this one and you got some value out of it you might enjoy this one over here it's a video on the 10 biggest Etsy mistakes that I see if you have an Etsy shop or you're thinking of starting one in the future I think you'll get some value out of it but yeah that's it for the video guys thanks so much for watching take care of yourselves and I'll see you in the next one bye [Music]

Channel: Tim Koa

Views: 712,300

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Id: 2Ys0vegoEco

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022