From craft fair side gig to
a real handmade business.

I’ve always wanted to have my own business. I’ve always just been fascinated with selling stuff. And like I said, I’ve had so many little hobbies before. I guess when we started A Sale A Day, I felt like, okay, I finally found it now I can make it a real thing, which I’ve always wanted to do, but before I couldn’t really see how to get past being a hobby. So it kind of seemed like my hobbies would always be hobbies. But when we found A Sale A Day, I saw the system and then I thought, okay, this is something that we can make a real thing.

We make wooden, literary themed products: bookmarks, key chains, notebooks, magnets, and we make everything from scratch. So we cut down the wood and then we burn them and paint them. And we burn all of the edges, which is why our studio is called Burnt Edge Studio.

I’ve just had tons of hobbies over the years. I’ve done jewelry and I’ve done glass painting and I’ve done bead making and just a variety of things. And I dabbled with trying to sell it. So I eventually got my little Etsy shop set up and I was trying to sell stuff on that and did a couple of craft fairs. And then Grace graduated with a degree in industrial design several years after I had graduated. And she really didn’t want to be traditionally employed. She wanted to be a maker and sell stuff on her own. And so we kind of joined forces and we were just kind of doing craft fairs and trying to do our Etsy shop. And it’s kind of little bits and pieces here and there not making a ton of money, but we were trying.

I joined one of your free webinars. And I listened to that and it just clicked in my brain. Just all the pieces that you laid out just really clicked. And I just saw it really clearly. So we had just done a craft fair recently. And we had a chunk of money from that and I talked Grace into spending all of that money on registering for your course. I think she was a little skeptical. I graduated in marketing, so I’m persuasive and I talked her into it. And we’re so glad that we signed up for it. I feel like we have a real business now.

A Sale A Day covered everything. Literally everything has been shaped by the program. It helped us to narrow down our product line and find a target market. We kind of had an art form figured out, we really liked using wood and paint and wood-burning. And we were just using that on a ton of different things. We were making wall art and bookmarks and children’s treasure boxes and there’s tons of different stuff. And we would sell that at craft fairs to a very general audience. But A Sale A Day really pushed us to focus on one product and find a target market for that product. And so we did, we picked bookmarks to be our starting point because we like making those, and the big difference that it made with selling those is a big differences in the price. So at craft fairs, we struggled to sell our bookmarks for $10. We often were selling them for maybe $8. But after we found our target market and started doing marketing towards them with our bookmarks, now we’re selling them for $25. And I don’t think we’ve reached the ceiling on that, where we’re going to, I think, try to push it up to $30 over the next couple of years. So that’s really exciting to learn our product is worth that much.

Another big thing that A Sale A Day helped with was it just helped connect all the dots between all the different resources that are out there. So I mean we knew about stuff like email marketing and social media and websites and all that stuff. And there were things we didn’t even know about like influencer marketing and how to use that. But there’s just so many different things that we didn’t see the connections between them or how to use them sort of in an integrated way to accomplish our end goal of selling products. And your course showed us how to streamline those. How do you line them all up in a streamlined way that leads to sales instead of just kind of, you know, doing little bits and pieces hodgepodge. We never would have put that together on our own.

A Sale A Day told us exactly what to do with everything, which was so helpful because we are not technology people. I heard you say that before that it’s really good for people who aren’t tech savvy, and we’re not. We do it when it’s necessary, but trying out new email providers and shopping around for website hosts, we probably wouldn’t have done that on our own or at least it would’ve taken us a long time and been kind of a painful process. So the fact that you tell us in the course what to do, who to go to for a website, who to go to for email, you give us specific providers of those things, and then you tell us what to do, like how to take photos of our products and how to make listings and what kind of content to put in our emails. And it was just so helpful. That saved us years of trial and error and trying to figure out stuff on our own and mess up.

Before we started A Sale A Day, we didn’t really have a business. I mean, we did craft fairs, but we didn’t have any previous customers or brand loyalty or even a brand or anything. So we were really starting from scratch. We enrolled in A Sale A Day last September. And for the first probably two or three months, we just went through the course and we started building up our website. We launched our website in January. We’ve doubled our investment in less than a year. So we didn’t lose any money there. It’s well worth it. There is no way we would have gotten our business up and running without A Sale A Day. We would probably still be doing craft fairs or scratching our heads over what to do.

For people who are considering taking A Sale A Day, I would just say, really, really invest in it and do the work. It’s really worth it, but you have to make it worth it by doing the work and really paying attention and following the advice that you lay out in the course. So really putting the time investment into it because it does pay off, and we’re seeing that.