How to Start Selling On Etsy (with Only $500)

have you ever wanted to start your own top ranking etsy store but you only got 500 to spend well you're in luck because i make 60 000 a month on etsy selling dog collars and in this video i'm going to show you a step by step on how to start a successful etsy shop with just five hundred dollars first calendar year year we did three quarters of a million how did you scale from a bedroom all the way to this business currently we are the number one pet product in terms of daily sales i don't like to print big rolls i try to stay as lean as possible how much does it cost to manufacture it i don't have to have the inventory so i print if it sells this is a boss laser it engraves all of our buckles all of our tags and that's the trick about why i decided to print my own fabric because that reduces how much money you spend on advertisement this is a basically a two needle sewing machine so it sews the strap with uh two needles at once so you're telling me that you started off from a hundred dollar sewing machine at walmart exactly and i don't even have a dog so that feels that like anybody can start and if you can reduce your price you can improve your conversion rate thus increasing your sales come here boy vlad is going to share with us his business strategies his marketing tools so that you can start your own etsy store big thanks to simplisafe for sponsoring this video vlad tell me more about yourself how'd you start how did you get to this point oh man i was actually i did physical therapy as my nine to five and i was kind of a sole provider but that wasn't enough money to to really sustain a you know family at this time because i was married i had a kid a one-year-old kid and on the side i started doing graphic design and a company reached out good friends of mine that actually ran a really successful etsy shop and they said hey why don't you design our product and with my design skill i kind of i went into that you know into that world of etsy because i didn't know etsy existed until they showed me and those guys are brilliant and so they showed they told you they pretty much taught me everything i know about etsy and understanding what knowledge i have with graphic design and how to apply that within to the market i realized like hey why not start an etsy shop myself and sure enough when i did start an etsy shop everything else was history so how many years ago did this start oh this is probably two and a half to three years ago but i haven't started my own etsy shop until about a little over two years ago let's talk about the product what are you doing and what's the top seller for you uh so we sell dog collars essentially our main thing is dog collars and leashes so this is our biggest seller peach floral it's uh people go crazy for that so this is beautiful and then we also do fully covered leashes too so and people like the fact that they can match the collar with the leash so okay um that's awesome we also do harnesses uh bandanas and tags so but like i said our biggest sellers are collars more specifically that design so this design how much does it cost to manufacture it yeah so the buckle in the metal components cost about three dollars the straps are pretty much free i mean i buy straps by large rolls and so per collar it's almost insignificant now the fabric and the ink is really the um where where that starts to get a little bit more pricey apart from the buckle and it costs about two dollars for the fabric and the ink to make this the strap and that's i'm actually trying to reduce that cost as much as i can wow but but i can't do anything about the price of the buckle and so if i'm selling a caller for about say 20 it'll cost me about 10 to 11 to make the caller including labor and shipping let me uh let me show you around okay yeah so over here we have our sublimation printer i just finished printing the designs i don't like to print big rolls i try to stay as lean as possible so we don't have the inventory and so whatever we're out of my print and then i come over here and i press with this uh heat press this is my beauty i love this machine fabric it's a roll to roll heat press um it does it can do a lot of fabric transferring that ink onto fabric and then with that fabric we saw the dark colors this is so cool i'm so excited i can't wait for you to share how everything all started yeah no this is uh i love this my passion so that's awesome [Music] where are you getting your supplies and where are the best deals yeah so that's a good question all my packaging and labels i get from a uline the nice thing about uline is they do overnight shipping which i love that because packaging um it's not that much per box but the boxes are large so i can't really buy up uh in enough inventory to last me for a year because it'll take up the whole shop so i want to buy small amounts uh for things like buckles that i use for every uh collar or fabric i have to buy it from china which i i buy enough inventory to use a forklift for that so so that's kind of how i sometimes i go on amazon to buy threads and things like that wow that's amazing makes sense well take me through the process okay so i need to actually order some um shipping labels uh and envelopes right now so i would go on uline i would open up my account and so let's go on new line on the order history i already bought a lot of the stuff and then i'm gonna buy a couple boxes of our larger envelopes which is um i believe it's six by ten so okay we need two boxes of that and i'll add it to cart and one after i add to cart i check out and um delivered to this address and then the process is pretty much done wow so and i delivered to my shop i don't need to go anywhere i've taken care of my inventory [Music] what has been the single most important factor growing your business there's a lot but i would say production if you can get your production right you're going to get your price right you're going to get scalability right and i started obsessing over that from very early on you don't have to have large equipment to do that you just need to have a direction saying i'm going to work on production i'm going to work on reducing the cost i'm going to reduce work on reducing the time it takes to produce this product and if you're going to take on that full on you're going to have much see much better results and it's going to take a lot of work but that's that i would say it's probably the most important thing all right so and i just got a shipment and so we can go ahead and pick that up it's outside okay sounds great so when you first started your etsy shop what were your greatest challenges and what did you do to overcome them oh my greatest challenge was the fact that when a product goes say viral or it starts to sell really well and then joanne runs out of fabric it runs out of fabric and that's why i made the decision to print my fabric so i can put unlimited amount i remember there was a time where it ran i ran out of some of my one of my hottest product and so i literally had to go to every joanne's throughout washington to buy that fabric i would go from seattle to coma and so on and so on every single uh uh joanne's that have that fabric i'll just buy it out and i'd go online on joanne online and i'd buy out anything that's available there and so my greatest challenge was scalability after i wanted to transition away from joann's okay you said you started with 500 how can somebody be watching today like i want to start this with 500 yeah for example if you want to start off with 500 bucks you get yourself a cricket cutter they're 200 bucks you pick up some heated uh the vinyl from joann's they have them you can apply that to champagne glasses and start selling personalized champagne glasses for bridesmaids or like i said you can get a heat apply for fabric that's a it's a it's a type of vinyl and that you also cut and you can apply that with an iron i mean it's as simple as using your iron um and so you can do 500 bucks you can do a thousand bucks by getting say a sublimation printer and getting yourself for sublimation printers go for about 500 bucks you can get yourself a heat press which is about 200 bucks and start um sublimating designs on t-shirts and um also aprons pillows and things like that so you can go as low as 1 500 to 1 000 bucks i mean you could spend ten thousand dollars on an embroidery machine and start embroidering uh you know so much more product as well or you can get a forged uh glow forge which is a laser cutter machine and you can start engraving wood products and cutting out woods summer's coming up so uh crafts are a big thing for camps and families that are doing little animal crafts and so you can be cutting those out with a laser cut out machine so so you can go anywhere from you know five hundred a thousand to five thousand dollars for like a laser cutter you guys be sure to check out our podcast where we interview successful business owners just like vlad and it's simple as go to www.upflip.com forward slash podcast [Music] yeah and over here we have our laser machine this is a boss laser it engraves all of our buckles all of our tags we personalize all our products so when people buy it on etsy it's personalized to each customer so we made to order we don't do anything by bulk so when our order comes in we engrave their buckle we then strap after so it starts from here and then it starts to move its way throughout the shop and then let me show you my strap strap machines up there uh we sew all of our straps upstairs and we don't want too much of uh straps that are not being sold and only have what is being sold uh in our inventory so okay yeah so this is my my fancy budget friendly office this is where i do my business but anyways so we have our sewing machines over here and uh these are our strap machines that they basically are two needle sewing machines so it sews the strap with uh two needles at once so it's very makes the process very very fast so it used to take us to uh about two to five minutes to make a strap for the dog collar now we make a big roll within like minutes so it's it's like it definitely increased our process and then here's our shelf of all of our designs that we have this is where we basically cut and get it ready to be sold for the final process awesome this is incredible [Music] guys before i decided to protect my house with simply safe this was my sad excuse for my home security system and it kind of worked but not as well as my simply safe home security system that was a breeze to install the simply safe home security system offers amazing features like entry sensor motion sensor glass breaking sensor panic button with easy-to-follow installation instructions simply safe even offers professional monitoring simplisafe is offering up flip viewers 20 off on your home security system plan when you signed up with the simply safe interactive monitoring plan and your first month will be free click the link in the description below or scan the qr code on the screen to learn more give me that pen oh oh come on so what are the most productive uh marketing strategies that you use for renzi yeah that's a good question uh i think the the most important thing is uh and i say this all the time is satisfy the keywords right essentially a customer is coming to etsy they're trying to buy something specific right let's say they're buying a t-shirt and they're saying i want a t-shirt that says um you know graduation is coming up and they're saying graduation mom 2022 right very specific and she types in like maybe at the end saying floral design so if you design a t-shirt that literally says that graduation mom 2022 with floral designs on it then she's like perfect that's exactly what i wanted so really satisfying the keywords as close as possible is going to be your best bet because that means you're going to rank better on those keywords because you've satisfied that keyword better than anybody else so the best marketing strategy is to find a way where you can be in charge of the design of your product okay which means manufacturing or production is essential that's why i decided to make my own doc collars instead of buying them from china because i can research the keyword where's their big traffic and then come as close as possible to that keyword as i can and how much do you typically spend a month on advertisements and what is your roi it's about 10 to 15 of my overall sales i spend on advertisements sometimes more sometimes actually less and so it's about seven to nine thousand per month is how much i spend on advertising now if you're you're obviously you can be fraction of that it's all about percentage also if you have better photos that improves your conversion oh that's good thank you so much for sharing that [Music] how do you build brand awareness when you first started your tag pub company and if you could just share some strategies when you first started how to get those first customers in yeah so in terms of brand awareness in the beginning you really want to focus on algorithm you want to grow an algorithm nobody really knows who you are and that's totally fine right so because they're going to start recognizing you as they are typing into a search engine and then they're finding a product not a shop a product that they like and they buy the product and then after they bought the product they got a chance to interact with the product the two things will happen right well three things if they don't like it then it's not gonna be good for you yeah but if they do like it two things will happen one is they'll come back and buy another product from you so a return customer is a cheap customer which means you don't pay money for them they they buy more product than you didn't spend on advertisement and the second thing that will happen is they'll tell their friends about it so if they have other dogs and they're like oh where'd you get that adorable dog collar oh it's a store on etsy called tag pop you should check them out right so they've referenced to your product now if you're selling a generic product that doesn't have any emotional response they might just say well i bought an etsy but you want to really elevate that emotional response to making an amazing product the one it looks good two it's good quality if you can have that spark that emotions when they got that product that's when you can have that brand recognition and that return customer coming back [Music] vlad do you use etsy ad campaigns and if you do what are some tips that you can share with us in terms of budgeting yeah i think etsy ads are are largely undervalued by sellers on etsy but if you do your product research correctly if you figure out a product that actually works on the market when you run etsy ads that will be the reason why your store is going to skyrocket and i teach this all the time on my youtube channel about how to run etsy ads and if you can get the fc ads down it's going to separate you from the rest of the shops and that's how you can become a top one percent store is if you keep pushing your uh your items to the top as much as you can because what etsy ads do is they split your listing or they duplicate your listing so now you have let's say you had 10 products well if you advertise all of them now you have 20. okay and do you advertise on a weekly basis and a monthly i i i let them run all the time i put the max as like as much as i can what is the max uh well they actually only let you do 1 000 okay dollars a day to spend and they never spend that because they only spend whatever people are willing to click oh okay um during christmas time there's a larger uh volume of uh visitors yeah and so uh there's there's that you spend more but when you during the weekdays because the there's not enough uh traffic fc tries to be a lot more fair to other shops so it doesn't just let your be spend all the time but i would recommend if you did your product research correctly to run ads as much as you can awesome so what are some of the must-have equipment that you use that you would recommend for people starting off as they're watching this video yeah well so the thing about etsy is that you don't need to have crazy equipment like i started off from a plastic sewing machine i actually went to walmart and i picked up their last sewing machine and this was like right before coven hit so everybody bought out a bunch of um a bunch of sewing machine i got the last one for 100 bucks and i pretty much had to learn how to sew all from scratch from youtube you know and so you don't need that much for uh for equipment and then went to joann's to got some fabric learn how to sew dog bandanas and then everything else after that followed oh man that's incredible so you're telling me that you started off from a hundred dollar sewing machine exactly walmart exactly and not knowing how to sew at all you just went to youtube and started all this and i don't even have a dog so that tells you that like anybody can start oh man you know and so somebody can go to joanne's and pick up a a circuit cutter or cricket cutter and um start you know applying personalization to like champagne glasses and the cricket cutter costs like 200 bucks i mean the the sky's the limit to where you can start and any normal person or any basic you know stat stay-at-home mom stay-at-home dad can start the nancy business without much upfront cost so you said you started from your bedroom yeah so let's say someone does not have the space to store all their supplies how would you recommend suggest where they go to purchase stuff yeah so i i still bought the buckles initially from china already they they allow you to there's sometimes manufacturers their minimum requirement is still small and you pay a lot more per unit but you can still buy a smaller quantity uh but you can also go like i said amazon and start buying uh buckles and components that or whatever you need for your stuff as far as far as fabric i did it from joann's that's where i got from the fabric i would literally go to joann's down the aisle and start looking for whatever looks good to use for my dog bandanas and collars and things like that that's awesome can you give us some samples can we go there today yeah let's do it all right let's go let me show you around all right guys let's go inside and i'll show you exactly what you what i did when i would need to buy fabric and i'll show you some ideas that you can do uh if you do want to start an etsy shop and you only have 500 bucks some of the stuff you can get from joann's uh you'd be surprised so let's come on in come on inside all right so when i come in here what i would look for is let's say i want to do like a dog themed dog collar or a bandana i would uh kind of see the keywords okay i could see dog collars pet paws or something like that buffalo plaid and paw you know so i kind of would find something that i think looks good and it would do well on the market and usually the things when if you are doing fabric or you are selling a fabric based product you want to make sure that the the keyword that you're targeting that the design is very visibly and uh vibrantly displayed on what you're gonna do so let's say if we're gonna do bumblebee you do want make sure you see a bumblebee not like you know you sew it and you can see a half of a bumblebee and the little guy is on the main page but make sure that when you take a photo that you know that bigger bumblebee is showing or you say uh cat unicorn you know and these are the things i would look for uh before coming joins and see if i can match a fabric to that and what i would do also when i would buy something from joanns i would look at their website because if you run if they run out of inventory here and sometimes they might not have enough you want to check on their website and see if they have some more inventory on their website so that way when you when you run out you go ahead and replenish that inventory and you have a way to do that on the etsy shop i mean how does your business the tag pub stand out from the other shops out there so so yeah that's actually a good question and that's the the trick about why i decided to print my own fabric because when other shops they either buy large bulk of a dog collar but they have a fewer different selections of dog collars because they buy it from china and then they personalize it which means they don't have a large selection because they they have to buy it by large bulks or there's shops that buy their fabric from joanne's and they have a large selection but they'll sell out of a particular design because joanne's will no longer carry that fabric whereas for me i can have a large selection and endless amount of supply so that allows for people to keep coming back to our shop knowing we will have always new designs so if christmas comes around we're selling santa dog collars we're selling you know reef dog collars st patrick's day you name it so we're we're able to be so much more flexible than any other shop which gives us the edge in the ranking because we can satisfy the keywords that are hot at that time oh awesome so roughly how many products do you have i mean well we have uh we have close to uh 100 different designs of dog collars wow that is incredible and the nice thing is i don't have to have the inventory so i print if it sells wow all right so what are great key components for listing your product on etsy i mean your photos and your listings your wordings because on etsy in large you're selling a want based product you're not selling screwdrivers you're not selling you know nail guns you're selling something that they don't have to have it's something they want to have and so when you're selling something they want to have emotional connection has to be the the priority right so photos are the number one things that do that so when you're buying a spoon you don't just buy a regular spoon you buy a rose gold spoon because you have spoons but you want it to add a little something to it so photos are essential it is the number one thing that we as uh want based product sellers need to focus on is create the atmosphere right like a tablecloth you don't just put a cloth on a table and take a photo but you got to make them feel like this uh cloth is the finest linens of germany with like you know you want to tell a story and so that that sparks an emotion like i want to be there and so you want to drag him in with photos so i think photos are largely undervalued and the second thing that is most important is the tags and titles those i kind of use those in parallel because when you're selling a particular product like for example if we're selling the pink hearts right the pink hearts we're selling that collar i need to make sure that when people type in pink hearts that my listing pops up how does it pop up well does the word pink hearts dog collar found in my listing right so when i am doing keyword research those are the words i want to look for and if i find that there's a lot of traffic going to the pink hearts dog collar well that's exactly what i'm going to design and create the listing for and i'm going to include that keyword in the tags and the title so that that way i rank on the proper or appropriate keywords with an appropriate product you essentially want to satisfy the keywords that people are searching into the search engine so what is your greatest expense uh well that that would actually be leasing the equipment even though we own half of our equipment because i saved up and bought it but we leased the other half and so it's a two year lease which means in two years we've owned our equipment but we started at least a two year lease period about a year ago a year and a half ago so we're coming up to paying it all off completely so it's going to be really nice and we don't have to pay that but our second largest one is the buckles because we buy them from china and the biggest expense of that is actually shipping yeah so because they're so heavy and so that would that would be our biggest expense so once your lease is paid for are you guys going to celebrate uh well yeah we'll do something that'll be fun [Music] so what are the key components to an excellent storefront yeah i would say visuals are going to be the top priority so do you present yourself as the one that knows this niche or are an expert in this area so if you are selling leather wallets or leather anything they looking at your your storefront they say wow this guy must be spending years studying sewing leather right so you have to present yourself visually as the authority in the space so and and the second thing is create your store in a niche mindset for example it says say you go to target and you want to buy yourself uh oh you want to buy some gift wrapping paper yeah well in that gift wrapping paper there's going to be tape there's going to be little bow ties there's going to be gift wrapping so it's it creates an experience where i'm going to get everything i need in this aisle so with a storefront you want to think the same way you want to think in terms of aisle or create an aisle experience so if i'm selling dog collars well they also can buy a bandana they can buy a tag or if i'm selling whatever you want to make sure that you create to where it's a stop it's all in one shop now you don't want to gener you don't want to have a general store where it's just everything right you're selling mugs you're selling t-shirts you're selling uh crochet needles and so on and so on you want to make sure that you sell something niched but creating that aisle experience where there's more than just one product so i think that would be a very big one because that reduces how much money you spend on advertisement because they can buy more than one product [Music] all right so this is the fan blitz we get to ask you let's do this number of questions and you just pound through them as fast as you can let's do it all right matt w is asking how do you do product research how do you find good niches in areas that seem to be competitive yeah so i use e-rank was one of them the other one is etsy you want to find other sellers that are doing really well with that product you got to figure out why and pretty much replicate it bam awesome yellow boat is asking what were some of the challenges you had in the very beginning of your daily operation of your business and how and who helped you work through them i think the first one is learning the machine and my mom my grandma and my aunt jason is asking how did you get notice on etsy when starting out and did most of your business come from etsy ads or organic researches so most of my sales begin with etsy ads because you've pretty much not noticed that etsy ads help you push to the top and over time my organics start to grow and now i'm getting more sales for more organic than from my advertisement excellent forte is asking is it worth paying on the etsy's fees are you getting most of your customers because of etsy oh yeah i think etsy is a great marketplace etsy spends a lot of money finding people that want to buy want-based products and those are some of the most expensive traffic to get and so that's why etsy does track uh charge for the fee because it takes it takes a lot to find somebody that get that has the money to spend on a one-based product especially during this economy so they're a good help for you yeah what was your favorite business book i think the number one book and i always say this is e-myth e-myth is like an amazing book it's a a guy that understands the complicated business concepts and is explaining it to a pie maker a lady who likes to make pies how to run a business and so i think i would recommend that hands down to anybody that's awesome how many times did you read that book i listened to it okay a few times yeah guys by the way we are giving away that book so a lucky winner will get that book all you gotta do is just comment below what so what kind of software do you use to track your sales or is that something built in through your etsy store yeah it's actually is built through your etsy store you can use uh you know third-party applications but etsy has a really great dashboard where it shows your conversion rate how are you increasing in sales are you improving your conversion rate and i really i love using that because when i especially when i launch a product i want to keep an eye is it growing organically the more money i'm spending on advertisement or am i just going to keep spending a lot of advertisement and it's just not growing organically i want to know that ahead of time in order to understand should i keep investing into advertisement or not so etsy has a great great platform to to see what your what your products are doing on the market essentially okay so you're saying growing organically is there a way something can grow not organically yeah so if the profit margins are great with advertisement i continue to invest i continue to spend money on advertisement which means that the advertisement listing will continue to grow in uh on the algorithm as well as the organic one so sometimes the organic one is above the paid advertisement sometimes it's the other way around depending on your profit margins if you're happy with them you keep advertisement if you're not you know you might want to pause the advertisement what is the greatest struggle that you're going through right now and how that affects your business and what are you doing about it yeah that's a good question so right now i'm dealing with cash flow that's a big one and i'm not good at organizing and math problems and you know budgeting and all that stuff so cash flow has been something i've been really learning as much as i can buying the inventory on time so that we don't run out of things and but having the money to do that is really um that's the struggle so you might have a lot of money coming in but if you don't manage it appropriately you're going to run out of it and then you're like oh wait i need money to buy more inventory of this i forgot that we needed more transfer paper or more thread we're running out of thread because you have employees you have to have everything in stock you have to when they come into work they got to know that they got work to do but if you don't have inventory you know you can't do that so keeping that consistent has been really difficult and that has been impacting us in in the way that i can't scale as fast as i would like to in the beginning we start scaling really fast first calendar year year we did three quarters of a million and we're like this is great but after that we started plateau because now that's always still growing a little bit but it's because of that cash flow because of that inventory that kind of slowed us down and so i'm trying to get past that once i get past that we're hoping to see more growth [Music] now tell me about the standard procedures how you operate your business what do you do how do you do it how do you manage all this yeah so i'm a big believer i really love how mcdonald's does her there's her whole uh process they they have stations and they they simplify each station as much as they possibly can and taking that model we i try to apply here so we start off from engraving the buckles right the buckles are engraved the guy comes in in the morning he engraves the buckles that are going to be part of the orders for that day and i'm finishing the prints then we're gonna then then i press and then the lady in the morning she finishes up all the straps she sews the strap using the machines that we have up there and then we bring the buckles that were engraved with the straps together and then we use the cnc machine to put it together and at the end of the day we package so it's a very simple simple process all right so look at this 164 bucks you can literally get this and start sewing right away so it's not that expensive to get in and singers they make fairly good solo mission you can go up up to 249 dollars so it really is not that expensive to get started on the sewing machine but i can show you other ideas that you can do if you want to start for messy so check this out if you want to get a cricut cutter you get this qriket cutter you get some vinyl and you go and get some champagne glasses and start personalizing them it's really you can check it out on etsy they sell really well and they buy more than one because they have several different bridesmaids and you can literally start selling on etsy for almost no money in a way say 500 bucks i really mean 500 bucks you don't have to buy a lot you can stop by either walmart or go on amazon and buy the little inventory like a blank you know apron blank t-shirt blank you know mugs cups whatever so but it's about doing the keyword research see what sells and see how you can apply this machine to that um so uh to that product so if you're selling say bridesmaids cups or mugs or t-shirts or aprons bridesmaids aprons so really nice you can also do that with this machine as well alright so hopefully that was helpful what you can get from joanns but let's head down back to the shop all right so you said you started in your bedroom and so how did you scale from a bedroom all the way to this business so yeah when i started sewing the dog collars or or bandanas dog band data i also kept in mind how can i make this trap faster how can i do it so that i instead of taking five minutes i can do one minute or two minutes now we make straps that takes us for for each collar the the amount of time it takes us to sew the strap it takes like five seconds because the process is so automated so it's all about how can you improve the process if you can improve the process you can reduce your price and if you can reduce your price you can improve your conversion rate thus increasing your sales it's that simple so um well it's simple but it's not easy so i'm trying to improve my process and i use duct tape and i went to home depot got the aluminum sheets and i bent them to create attachments to my sewing machine so i i created attachments to to make the sewing much faster and smoother and as i was improving the process i started to learn about sewing and how how china does it i was looking all over the internet to see how does china sew dog collars and there's not much content out there for dog collars and so then i came across a cnc machine it's pretty much a machine that sews the box stitch and i'm like perfect that's going to cut down on my production and it it cost about ten thousand dollars to get one so we saved up and bought it and that improved my process and i was able to start hiring people to say okay you're going to work on the cnc machine and because it's such an easy process now it was just literally a one to a foot click it gave me the ability to now focus on other things and that allowed me to start scaling with machinery and process and thus giving me more profit margins and reducing my cost for the product and and beating out my competition on etsy what do you do to generate more positive reviews and what are you doing with the negative ones yeah um actually yeah so reviews are are critical on etsy because if you think about it the seller the buyer is going on etsy the thing that they're going to be relying on is the reviews what other people said about their product when they purchased it so it is very important to make sure that you have good reviews and the way we do that is communicating well and improving your process to produce a quality product okay so communicating well how often are you on the reviews and getting back to the you know customers i used to be a lot more than i am now you know in fact one of the complaints recently was that the fabric was um was uh too thin and we're actually going to be upgrading our fabric to something a little bit more firm and a little bit more rigid um and so that's going to be how i respond to that complaint but with complaints it's really important to listen to them it's it's really important to not overthrow them or like ignore them because critics tell you how to improve your product and you need to listen to that because that's valuable for you and i have a system for a customer service gal so we have if it's their fault uh these are the options that we can do and some of that means like hey we can actually fix it for a much cheaper price just send us the product back just leave the buckle on there and we'll re-strap if it's say a wrong size and we'll just charge them for the shipping and the strapping but if it's if it's our fault then obviously we'll just refund or or or remake the caller depending on what they want if the issue is just they're just picky about the the shade of the color then we would ask them to ship it back to us and oftentimes customers say you know what it's not that bad so we kind of have a system on how we deal with complaints and how the customer service gal has a response to that we try to have a system in that as well awesome so how many employees do you have and what are the starting wages how do you find great employees or how do you train them so that's a good question i have about seven employees um one of them is full-time the other one she used to be full-time she went down to 30 hours and the other five they are part-time so but as far as paying the employees i actually invest a lot more into machines and letting the machines do as much work as possible that way it's one two buttons you know that's all they have to press and that means they don't have to have a skill level that uh becomes really expensive and nowadays so you want to have machine operators instead of skilled labor you know does that mean so so i'm trying to focus more on machine operators than skilled laborers yeah absolutely so the machines are doing the hard the tough work and anybody looking for a part-time job whether it's summer or winter they can just come in stations set up all they do is one two and three kind of exactly that's awesome what are the biggest reasons why etsy shops fail and how can some of those mistakes be avoided yeah so i think the first thing is because etsy is a platform for uh creatives or artisans they're gonna bring their emotions to the market so if they really love crocheting if they really love pottery and they bring their emotions to the market they try to sell their craft and they find that it's not selling that could be a pretty devastating or you might have an opinion about etsy it's a it's a big joke i'm not going to sell on it but you got to come to the market understanding hey what how can i apply myself so i'll look at the market objectively and not emotionally and then bring emotions or a passion into your product so i don't even have a dog i didn't know how to sew right i had nothing i have no knowledge of sewing fabric but i realize that that's what the market demands and then i started to apply my knowledge of graphic design uh to the product after it became uh began to start picking up traction so it's it's uh hold off on your passions for just a little bit apply yourself to the market on what the market demands and then start bringing your passion into it and find ways to integrate it within your product to stand above the competition [Music] now let's talk about profit margins all right what are they for you what does it look like um so there's a theoretical profit margins and then there's the practical one right okay theoretically we are 50 profit margins right but practically we have leasing equipment where where there's so many uh things that we're developing and there's so many things that we're paying off and credit card you know and all that stuff we're paying off so we're really close on budget right but theoretically if everything is uh paid for and we've taken care of all our uh expenses that are that are like loans and leases then it is 50 and once we get to that we'll plan to reinvest and keep growing yeah that's pretty cool so when you first started in your own bedroom um profit margins i'm assuming they were closer to 70 80. until you started accumulating more actually it was even less than so it was less because we're making more profit now because of the machines that they're doing a lot more work and faster so so yeah when you start off your profit margins are smaller unless you charge an arm and a leg for your dog collar which a lot of people do because they don't have a process they don't have a system it takes them 30 minutes to make a dog caller and they will charge 50 to sixty dollars so yeah and vice versa it takes you five seconds yeah well now five things but right now it takes us about a minute and a half to two minutes to make a caller from start to finish you guys if you're enjoying this video go ahead and just hit that like button right now and we'll continue on with the video [Music] and what other systems are you currently using that are helping you grow your business our fulfillment software that we use is called ship station it's a really nice software that allows you to process orders large quantity of orders when we would have 10 to 20 uh orders per day we would use etsy and that worked fine for us but once we're starting to get it to the 100 orders 200 orders you know we we then need to use something a little bit more beefy and shipstation allows us to fulfill orders by bulk so we can ship by bulk we can you know scan bulk and so it gives a barcode which it lets the the flow a lot a lot more efficiently [Music] are there any underserved niches on etsy so if somebody wants to start a shop are there any good categories that you think would be very successful for them you could pretty much start selling anything that has a large traffic so you don't need necessarily need to focus on some kind of a niche now there are some niches that i would love to go into that i don't have the time for but i think children or kids like uh kid aprons onesies pacifier clips that's what my wife started to kind of dabble a little bit and she's getting way too much orders and she's trying to do as least amount of work as possible because we have kiddos and so she's trying not to but yeah things like kids and you can even uh pick up like a cricket cutter like i was talking about earlier and personalize the uh the aprons that moms like to personalize for their kids to uh when they're baking when they're cooking that's going to be selling really well especially during the summer so there's so much you can do in the kids space that i would love to go in full heartedly but i just i'm way too busy with pet products but with kids they grow fast so which means if they have more than one kid at the time they they're always buying from your store especially if you have different age groups sizes for each age group during christmas time you can do matching pjs so there's so much you can do and i haven't even begun talking about the wedding products so oh man vlad i love this so much and i thank you for sharing your thoughts as a business owner of what someone can be doing right now you just dropped a huge bomb for these people so thank you so much for sharing that problem [Music] what about social media i mean are you using facebook instagram on anything and if so what are the best platforms and how do you uh how to utilize that yeah actually uh so there's there's different approaches for etsy and i'm actually taking the approach where i don't use any social media there's a lot of shops out there that use pinterest and instagram and they're really big on that but i actually don't use any social media i focus a lot more attention on the algorithm than the social media because when people come to etsy they already have the intention to buy but they're when they're watching on instagram they could be sitting on their toilet searching through instagram so they might not be ready to purchase but if i can put all my attention onto the algorithm on the marketplace john the people that are ready to buy i will have better results and sure enough that's what resulted in me getting better sales okay that's interesting but what about the person sitting on my toilet what if they're ready to buy if they're ready to buy the last thing it could be a tip for you in the future well and we've started growing our instagram account and i i do my tick tock and all that stuff but uh when i did start to grow i focus all of my attention on the algorithm that makes sense on seo and things like that awesome so tag pup is top one percent of all etsy shops so how do you get those rankings and what can one do to get those rankings boosted yeah well so so i i don't think it really benefits your store to be the top one percent when you go on e-rank e-rank is a uh software that's a third-party application that gives you uh data about the market and it'll give you that one percent thing which is kind of it's a good feeling but it doesn't help you with the market and so currently we are the number one pet product in terms of daily sales so which is a cool thing but we're not the number one pet product store because somebody sold a hundred thousand orders where we've only done eighty thousand but they've existed for like five years whereas we only existed for two years so they only look at like how much you made overall and so but it does it does feel great though to be the top one percentage sure it is congratulations yeah thank you so when you think you will be top one or like the one for for pet products or everything yes well pet products i think next year will probably be the number one in terms of overall sales but so yeah we'll see is there anything you wish you knew before you started your business either about etsy or just in general of business ownership what comes to mind is i wish i hired photographers earlier on and i think instead of spending time on taking photos i should have spent time on production and other things like seo and so i wish i hired photographers earlier on okay because they're not that expensive especially if you're going to have them do a photo of your product you can literally mail that to them and they can use their environment to take a photo and edit all that because they have all the tools and the process to do that that's awesome because i was going to ask you like do they come here or do you so you mailed it to them yeah i mean you can't mail it to them or you can just uh meet up with them and then if you can find a local photographer is it pretty inexpensive yeah well like recently i had a photo shoot i spent i paid them 100 bucks 150 with tip and she took a photo of like six different callers now that's that's a that's a perfect case scenario but it's within that range okay [Music] all right so what skills did you draw prior to coming in into tag club i think the first one is the the knowledge that the guys that i worked for have you know bestowed upon me right they they taught me everything uh they know about etsy and the manufacturing back end of it so that really what helped me a lot when i came into the market and the second one is graphic design i'm a graphic designer so i kind of know how to build a brand and i would also say seo i built websites before i i did some advertisement for for companies uh designing their advertisements so i understood conversion rates or how to make it say hey if it's selling better when it's red or blue and an employ um designing according to the conversion rate so according to the data so for example if i'm selling this uh watermelon dog collar right and when i'm selling the dot watermelon dog collar do i understand how much traffic looks for that if there's a good amount of traffic looking for that i want to make sure i title my products accordingly in order to start showing up on top of those high traffic keywords and making sure that if i'm selling a black watermelon dog collar well i'm like the closest product to those keywords right and that's the nice thing about printing your own fabric is because you can really satisfy keywords a lot better than anybody else because you're literally designing to that keyword which means you have a higher success rate to rank on a given keyword [Music] what is your approach for providing excellent customer service skills on growing your ecommerce the one thing i kind of touched a little bit about that is creating a process for the customer service gal that does all our customer service for example if like i said if there's their fault this is what they do if it's our fault this is what they do and there's always like little grace moments and throughout the whole process that they're always going to expect the same answers no matter if they let's say the same person got the caller wrong twice they will get the same response so there's kind of a process and it allows the customer service gal not to lose her mind over her job she knows exactly how to process that so i think having a consistency in the customer service is important but uh customer experience again you want to create a great product you want to create a product that just wow people comment on it so when you create something that when they're walking their dog and uh so many people are commenting about on the dog collar all of a sudden that creates a little bit more into it puts a little bit more into your brand and so that customer experience there they come back and they'll email us or they'll build on instagram saying everybody's commenting on the caller thank you so much you know stella loves it you know so that's kind of i would say have a good process on customer service but ultimately have a great product you guys be sure to watch our previous video with the owner of black sunflower she's a successful business owner who is in the kennel making business you guys thank you so much for taking your time and watching this episode i hope you sure enjoyed this as vlad has took a step by step of his etsy shop that you can start today and before you go please hit that like button have a great day

2022-05-02 15:08

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