How Mandy Sold $100k In 10 Months With Print On Demand & Etsy! 🔥 (In 2022 - 2023!)

if you're new to selling on Etsy and wondering is it even still possible in 2023 then you are going to love this interview that I did with the Etsy seller Mandy she started in 2022 and in less than 10 months was able to sell over 100 000 starting and scaling her first ever Etsy imprint on-demand store so I can't wait to share her story with you she shares tons of great tips of exactly how she got there and how you can too so make sure to stay tuned all the way until the end and let's say hello to Mandy hello Mandy thank you so much for being here with me today thank you so much for having me yes of course I've been following your journey a little bit on your channel after seeing your Business Insider article that you had so super excited to have you on I think your story is really really inspiring especially for anybody that is just getting started on print on demand and is wondering is this possible still in 2022 do in 2023 to be successful so I'm so excited to share your story with my channel here I'd love to start out by just hearing a little bit more about your story because I know this isn't actually your first time selling on Etsy I'm kind of stalked of myself as a serial entrepreneur I've always needed a bit of a creative Outlet so my schooling and career was always in human resources and I have a little bit of a technical background with ID project management but I actually have a handmade business it's handmade natural skincare that I started on Etsy in 2017 just as you know truly a side hobby you know Covergirl stop making my favorite lip balm and the rest is history right but you know and so I've done that for many years and continued to do that I actually saw on Shopify primarily with that now a couple years ago I really wanted to start thinking about a creative Outlet so I ended up with my handmade business being able to leave my Human Resources world I was nature director for several years with the pandemic like so many people I was just completely burnt out thankfully I was one of the fortunate ones that had something to fall back on and could really continue to grow my handmade business so really fast forwarding to 2022 I again am someone who needs that creative Outlet while I was doing my handmade stuff you know full time during the day really needed something for in the evenings or just during down time when I wasn't necessarily feeling like production or fulfillment of all the other stuff where I could have that Creative Energy go someplace and be productive with that and really landed on a few different things but one of them was this world of print on demand I thought that was the coolest thing and again being someone who comes from a handmade you know fulfilling everything myself background for so many years I think the notion of being able to make all these products with my designs and creation putting them on a variety of different products and having somebody else really do the heavy be lifting in my opinion print on demand is the coolest thing since sliced bread right because I'm able to run my handmade business and do print on demand and have this whole other side business right alongside it without feeling like I'm losing out on either so that's what I set out to do in roughly May of last year 2022 and was just on this journey of let's see where this can go yeah I love that you know I feel super similar obviously I'm very obsessed with print on demand and how it's helped me change my own life I was able to quit my job in a little less than a year and a half selling print on demand so it absolutely is such a cool Avenue because you know I have a life and a family and I had a job for a lot of that time and I was able to build it on the side in the time that I had so I do think it is an amazing opportunity obviously that's why we're here and I think that's again why I really love your story because you got started in 2022. that's not that long ago I mean you're coming up you've been selling uh print on demand for just about a year now then and so in that time I saw from one of your YouTube videos you've been able to sell over a hundred thousand dollars on Etsy congratulations to you but what I want to break down in this interview is kind of figure out maybe some of those things that helped you get going that way the people that are watching can kind of replicate some of that and figure out how to get to their first 100K as well so why don't you walk us through a little bit of the beginning of your print on demand process and some of the things that you learned as you got started like how long did it take you say to get your first sale yeah I want to say my first sale was probably a couple weeks after I started so when I got into this I was very late to this whole Tick Tock world but by the time I got to it I was seeing all these videos of you know selling print on demand and making all this money and so part of me was like number one I'm like an Insider closeted competitor person so I'm like well if they can do it I wonder if I can do it surely surely I could figure this out so I'm like you know what I'm gonna go all in on this I I want to see if I you know give this the best job that I can what can I make of this and doing a lot of what they said not to do which was letting my shop with a lot of listings right and I try to do that very quickly and again thinking of the fact that I'm also wearing this handmade business I had to do it in what I call pockets of time so I only had you know evening sometimes little bits during the week when I could work on it so I had to really maximize how efficient I was being with getting all these little things up there so I knew I needed to do my research so I spent some time on e-rank I used marmalade for a while because these were all tools that I was familiar with when I was growing my handmade business early on in the Etsy days and so you know researching the different Target audiences and niches that seemed like they would be interesting and could get some more traction and then I was working on design so I always created probably 98 of my lines in canva again it was a tool that I was already familiar with so it's you know the barrier entry was relatively low in that regard because I could just jump right into it the way I work my designs was I have this list of niches or keywords that I thought about you know a lot of them were around occupations or you know Veterinary technicians you know trying to think Super specific and then I would create a bunch of designs in canva and really create them in kind of a batching method and so canva made that really easy I could create you know kind of one basic design or you typically I would make you know 9 10 or 11 rough Design Elements and then I would go into each of those and I could change just one part of it for each of the different niches that I was working within so in Fairly short amount of time I could very easily knock out 10 12 designs and just start cranking out those listings I will say not all of my early designs were as specific as I probably should have gone I think there really is a lot of Truth and validity to working within a more specific niches because typically those were the ones that sold better for me fastest whereas a lot of the really General stuff you know coming into it in May really wanting to ramp up for you know that wonderful Q4 time that I had heard everybody talk about you know starting to add in some Halloween and Christmas designs and I sold a handful of those especially once I got closer but by and large really focusing on those niches and trying to think about designs that would resonate with specific audiences was what really helped me grow a lot faster and again part of it was really about volume Etsy especially in more recent years because it has grown so significantly both in terms of number of shops number of sellers that are out there as well as number of customer but it's much more of a volume game than it used to be so in 2017 when I first started you could I think my early shop had maybe 30 listings and I could get pretty decent sales with that even a fairly saturated Murphy even at the time of skincare nowadays can you be successful with just a handful of listings maybe probably going to be a lot slower than most people really like or are expecting when they go into this mindset you know to really start seeing that traction that I redesigned sell no I think this is the certain normal statistic is I think it's what 20 of your listings are what's going to sell and so the only way to really get there and to really start to in my mind see what's going to work is to have that volume and so that was really the mindset that I went into it with is I don't necessarily know what's going to resonate the most or the best with different audiences or which Niche audience is going to do the best in this shop so I went across a bunch of different niches whether it was occupations Hobbies travel destinations you know really trying out all of it so that I stood the best dance again in my mind of really getting that volume and having something out there that would resonate and then from there I could use that data right I could easily go in and look at my stats in Etsy look at all of my listings with this that view turn on and see gosh this is you know this listing or this handful of listings in this Niche they're not getting any views or visits or anything but this Niche really seems like they're starting to pop up in searches because I can see I'm getting views and visit I can see I'm starting to get favorites oh that one has pencil I'll add more so that I can really fill out a full section related to that Niche or niches and so it was really about getting that volume out there to get data to help me make a better Vision if you're wanting to do it quickly if you want to do it slower and more organically and don't mind not getting as many views early on that fine but I think you and I both know that most people who are wanting to start on this and really have a successful business they're wanting to see traction right away we live in an age where there's no patience and so we want to see the return and result on all of our work and so like I said in my mind the fastest way to do that was to just start pushing it out there to see what would work yeah no I think that's really one of the biggest reasons why I wanted to reach out to because it seems like you built your business in a really similar way as me you know having a general store where you sell lots of different niches I think is the best fit for Etsy because everyone comes to Etsy usually with something in mind it's a marketplace right they come they type in gift for Mom or funny mom shirt or something specific they look through those search results they pick one and they buy it you know very rarely are people actually coming to your Etsy store and shopping just specifically with you they have to find you within one of those search results first so the more searches you can show up in on Etsy the more chances you have to catch those customers each individual Niche only has so many people that are going to be shopping for it and so if you can show up in lots of different ones I know I've sold in probably a thousand different niches even know over the years so I think it sounds really really similar you know the scalable designs come up with one nice design template you scale it out into lots of different versions I know I just did a video two weeks ago I'll link it down in the description how to make a hundred designs in less than an hour using canva bulk create I don't know if you use the bulk create feature but that is like the biggest Time Saver of my whole life having them just make all the designs for me in two seconds and so I think it really is that way too you know if you look at the top shops on Etsy most of them do have 500 a thousand two thousand uh listings if not five thousand lists there's some huge shots out there and if you a lot of times look at those shops you know one of the things I like to do on e-rank is to look at some of those really big shop and like you said nine times out of ten these are huge shops and they're quite often selling across a variety of different niches and it's not even necessarily complicated designs you know like you've said recently like a lot of people say dimple does still sell you just have to know the right Market you know and understand your Niche or selling in to make it work but you can definitely crank out a lot and it's going to in return give you lots of data I think I feel like that's a huge question that I get all the time even just with you know do I start at Etsy do I start a Shopify where do I go and you know like you said my first reaction is always going to be Etsy because it's a market you know you can still build a brand a lot of people want to I want to build a brand that's great but start and learn and understand you know and validate what you want to sell using a Marketplace like Etsy and then if you want to build on a Shopify later and really invest a lot of time and a different learning curve you can do that down the road with a shop a fire a wig or whatever having that nice right exactly and then there's different ways of moving that traffic off of your Etsy as well and driving that but being able to utilize that Marketplace on Etsy and the organic traffic that Etsy is bringing in love it or hate it you know I'm happy to pay those fees for all of the traffic that Etsy is driving you know to my shop with the work that I put into it because it's definitely possible once you figure out how to work that engine of sorts yeah absolutely well and I think there's going to be a burning question a lot of my subscribers are going to have and is it has most of your sales come organically or do you utilize things like Etsy ads in your business to help it getting going in the beginning and especially around the holidays I did have a d turned on and I use it again for a very specific purpose you know in the beginning when I was growing I wanted to again get data and in my experience and you know the way I was thinking about it to do that data comes from views visits favorites and seeing what it's going to resonate and then convert into sales and to really exponentially increase that you turn on ad that's more or less what they're there for is is to boost it to see what's going to start converting and so in the beginning when my shop was brand new I was turning on ads to really increase that view and see what would then convert into sales or wouldn't and then I would play around with turning on and off those keywords and really turning off listings as I saw that yeah that one's really just not going to convert and then you know over time I would turn the ads off on listings that weren't the highest converters or maybe had more competition in the marketplace so maybe it's getting a lot of views maybe there's another competitor out there that you know could compete better on price for example so my particular listings for whatever reason weren't converting into sales and so then I would really play around with that and so now I really use it more so for newer listings for again the same reason is to boost that initial view on Etsy to get some additional traffic there so that I can see faster if a listing is going to do well or if it's just maybe one that's going to need more of a long game and could sell down the road so I'm not going to just get rid of the listing but I might change some things over time or just you know let it sit there for a while and really focus more of the attention on listings that are converting and niches that are converting so I guess in a couple different ways and even in the newer shop was an interesting experiment so I started an additional shop when I started my YouTube channel because I really wanted to be able to show you know a shop name if people want to go out and check it out cool it's not going to mess with any conversion on my primary shop or anything like that I started a very Niche specific shop and I used essentially repeated the same approach that I started with my main shop last year just to kind of see if it was a repeatable process and it was interesting so I don't spend as much time there now obviously adding new things it was more so just get it started and let it hang out but in the beginning I did exactly that I got to 100 sales relatively quickly and about 60 of those came from ad those are sales and visits and Views that I probably would not have had had I not had those turn on and then it create again once you get that momentum with Etsy it will generally keep going so even if I turn off ads which I have in that shop I still now organically because my shop got the Boost from having more orders right away from having good reviews right away and really seeing that traction faster it essentially tells you know the Etsy ranking system this is you know a legitimate shop and so you start to get that organic Etsy ranking faster as a whole shop and so now oh I can turn off ads on that because again I'm not necessarily wanting to dump a lot of money into that particular shop um but you know the point is it it grew relatively quickly when I just started that a few months ago as part of my YouTube channel to have that available to show and you know do trainings and things like that right on screen so it was an interesting experiment and to then specifically track even the ads numbers for sales of using that that method and again it's very much a love-hate relationship with Etsy ads and so I I know that not everyone loves that and that's okay you still can I think with the volume you'll get that organic traffic like I said I used it for a very specific reason to have that data and to really fast track that momentum knowing and feeling confident in the designs and the SEO that I was putting into it I think I think that's really the big disclaimer and the big caveat with ads is you know making sure that you are putting out good designs that your SEO is at least to the best of your ability that you you've done research on keywords and that you're not just dumping a bunch of etsy ad dollars into really General designs probably aren't going to be able to compete even with ads with some of those big shops that are out there yeah no that's super inspiring so I guess just a like a quick question then so comparing you starting a new print on demand store last year to you starting a new one this year to use as a test how long did it take you to get each of those two shops to that hundred sales how long did it take you say your first shop last year I think that's where a lot of people are is that first hundred feels really hard feels like it takes a really long time and then you start to really gain that momentum because now you've got some sales and some reviews so how long did it take you to do that each time I want to say I hit 100 sales in last year probably closer to around July I think end of May so maybe that kind of 45-ish day window to really start seeing that again I feel like I got a lot of fraction they're pretty quickly and then with my current shop I want to say it's right around 160 right now and I started in the middle of January so maybe closer to March I want to say it felt surprisingly quickly but again I think that had a lot to do with just the volume and being very specific and strategic with how I use ad dollars to really kind of fast track that because like I said my approach to mindset was all about fast tracking I guess that that's not what everyone prefers but that's where I was able to really find success faster you know in doing more or less the same activities as as anyone else would but to really just hone in on a couple specific strategies within that no I think that's super valuable I really appreciate you coming on and sharing all of your valuable tips like you gave us even more than we bargained for probably with exactly what that process looked like what your mindset was so I really appreciate appreciate you coming on and I will go ahead and Link Mandy's YouTube channel because she has a lot of great tutorials on her own channel I'll link that down in the description so make sure everybody to go subscribe to mandates to follow her journey as she still keeps growing this second print on demand store along with her handmade business and you can you know follow her on her Channel and ask her any questions that you might have for her in the comments of this video or in the comments of her videos and it was so nice to meet you Amanda I really appreciate you being here this is so much fun to get to know you and your story a little bit more thank you so much I really appreciate it I really hope that you enjoyed this interview today with Mandy and you'll go over and give her some love on her Channel and if you are just getting started and wondering what those first steps are I will link down below my free nine module mini course that will teach you how to get started with Etsy and print on demand step by step from getting set up for the first time with Etsy and printify all the way through creating and listing your very first design so as always thank you so much for staying all the way until the end and I'll see you in the next one [Music] foreign

Channel: Cassiy Johnson

Views: 35,496

Keywords: Etsy print on demand, print on demand etsy, selling on etsy for beginners, how to sell on etsy, Printify and Etsy, how to start an etsy, how to scale on etsy, etsy success story, etsy success stories, passive income ideas, make money from home, side hustle ideas, best side hustle 2023

Id: zKQgH5XQ0KU

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2023