Deciding what to sell on Etsy was not entirely my choice, I kind of threw everything in my wheelhouse at the wall and waited till one stuck. I know there are a lot of blogs out there telling you the dos and don’ts of selling on Etsy and deciding your niche is probably the first thing on the list, but do you?
When I reopened my shop in April, I was selling bachelor party koozies, save the date stickers, acrylic wedding signs, and the cake stands (as well as quite a few other items) under the “Party Decor” category. I thought that I was selling a diverse assortment within my “niche” but what I had was a mess.
Inventory & Production Planning
I couldn’t order supplies in bulk because I wasn’t getting enough orders yet and so I was using Amazon to get fill-in supplies which was costing me more money over time.
Each item also took a different amount of time to produce and required different shipping materials to ship. Cake stands are in various box sizes, stickers are in envelopes, and koozies are in padded envelopes.
Removing Inefficiencies
With each item I decided to remove, I found inefficiencies that made it unprofitable or too time consuming to fulfill orders in a timely manner. For example, with the stickers, design and customization was easy to accomplish, but where I found issues was cutting them with my Cricut, I would waste pages of stickers paper and ink because the alignment of the machine would be off by 1/16 of an inch ruining an entire page of stickers.
The koozies were very good for the profit margin, but they were the most time consuming item on my listings. If I were to get an order of 9 bachelor party koozies (which was the average #), I would be weeding vinyl for 5+ hours. This would take up time that I could be doing other things for other items. The time spend did not equal the amount of money being made per koozie.
What Next?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t only want to sell cake stands, but finding the next step that feels natural has been a process. I want to tell a cohesive story in my shop but we don’t have the manpower to make and sell multiple different items.
New items to come. I promise.
