June was good.
Activity
At the start of the month, I was running a Father’s Day promotion that brought in some sales. In the process, I learned about how to get the most out of Etsy ads and learned a bit about another potential buyer profile.
Indeed, for the new buyer profile, I worked up a bunch of new listings, to A/B test how my original and new profile listings perform. Tho testing will take a few months to see any movement, as I don’t have such high traffic.
As for traffic, seems steady, but not stellar. Tho my conversion rate is good and has been steady since the opening of the Etsy store.
Top merch
June is a bit skewed due to the ad campaign, but my small collection of mugs have been getting some interest. As did my retro-computing designs (such as the Moto 68000) and some women investor patents (such as Ellen Eglin). But, as in previous months, the AD570 and the Raspberry Pi 5 are still the best performers.
Another custom request
I get a thrill every time a customer asks for a custom design. I now even put a button to request one on my Etsy store.
This time, a customer had purchased the Ellen F Eglin shirt, which shows the first page of the patent Eglin sold. Eglin sold the patent because she didn’t think any white woman would use the product she invented if they knew it came from a black woman. In my design, I cross out the name on the patent and put in Elgin’s name, where it should be.
The customer asked if I could turn it into a poster, which I had never done before. And she asked the design be the second page of the patent.
I worked up the poster (see image) in two sizes, and it looked pretty cool. I also went ahead and made a shirt version of the second page of the patent.
The customer bought the poster. And I hope she might share a pic of it on her wall.
You can see the shirts and poster here.
Lastly: an new store
I tend to see who follows me on Bluesky, in case I wish to follow back. One fellow, in early June, followed me and when I investigated, turns out he built a new maker-focused market place, SmallRun, in the spirit of long-faded ThinkGeek and Tindie. I mentioned it here, in my store blog, when I started investigating and setting things up.
The past few weeks with SmallRun have been fun, as the site builder keeps adding great tweaks based on feedback from all the folks using it. Glad to be a beta tester. And glad to be able to sell my merch thru the site.
One of the things I knew about Etsy was that it wasn’t really the right maker-focused marketplace for me. But I used it for an easy maker place to learn the processes, build my portfolio, and improve my listings. This helped me to readily jump into SmallRun.
And being in a maker-focused marketplace has certainly paid off as expected: I have already been making sales, not even a month in!
I’ll be eagerly tracking the growth of my SmallRun store. Let’s see how it goes.