Everyone starts their art journey somewhere, and for me, that was at a neighborhood ceramics studio a little more than a year ago. I became addicted to the feel of clay, the triumph-failure cycle of the wheel, the loop-de-loop of joy and horror when pieces finally emerged from the kiln.
I turned out cheerful if not masterful pieces with reckless proliferation: The lumpy pink vase, the thick-bottomed trinket bowl, the loopy cup with uneven seafoam glaze. But then as I proudly posted pieces on social media, a weird thing started happening: People wanted to buy them.
It seems I had a new side hustle. But I wasn’t sure how to navigate or optimize the sales to people I didn’t know, the low- and high-hanging fruit. “Just open an Etsy store,” a voice told me. It was an inner voice, though — a voice that knew exactly zero about selling art and craftwork even though I’ve sold dozens of pieces of flipped and found furniture online.
I spent days photographing my ceramics, measuring them, weighing them and coming up with (what I thought were) perfect hashtags for the listing. I clicked a link to go live. And then? Not much happened. My Etsy store feels like one of those abandoned Old West towns where every now and then a cowpoke will ride through, pick up a bag of feed, and go on their way
Since I opened in March, I’ve had 17 orders resulting in $362.73 in sales, but paid out $52.81 in listing and commission fees, $97.66 in marketing and $100.40 for shipping, leaving a net profit of $111.86. Not nearly enough to make all that listing work worth it.
But there was one item that kept selling out consistently: my flower frogs. These are ceramic disks the size and shape of coasters that harken back to Victorian times, but with holes so you can turn stems in a plain old jar or glass into a masterful flower arrangement. I thought I’d use that as my test item across all platforms, but a retail store bought all my inventory, and then the next two batches. The hidden variable skewed my research.
Sell like the pros
My marketing approach has been scattershot at best, but I have learned there are best places and practices for selling anything. Etsy is still the powerhouse platform to build a brand and scale up sales for art and handiwork. There’s a small fee and Etsy takes a cut of sales, but shipping labels are discounted so you’ll pay less than if you purchased them at the post-office.
In eight years, Dylan Jahraus has sold $1.7 million worth of items from her Etsy empire and teaches others her secrets in what she calls The Ultimate Etsy Course. It all started when she listed a letter “J” covered in flowers, leftover from her wedding, to show customers the kind of thing she could custom make for them. “Within four months, I scaled to over $10,000 a month, and over a million in profit within five years. So start with what you have.”
She then went on to learn the ways to optimize listings without paying for ads, but warns success takes more than pressing go and waiting for the orders to roll in.
“You really need to start in an aggressive, active way with a lot of strategy behind your listings, so that then this can become passive.”
Create products for your target customer, she advises. The Etsy customer, she explained, is willing to pay a premium and is more patient than the Amazon customer who expects their cut-rate item to arrive overnight.
“You don't need 50 listings to be successful in Etsy. You can be successful with 10 listings, but quality really matters, so don't put up listings that aren't optimized with SEO, otherwise you will develop a low conversion rate, which gives your shop a negative quality score,” she warns. “You want to make sure you start correctly, otherwise you may end up starting over once you learn the right strategies.”
She also said it’s important to amplify your value proposition through your photos and your price points. “If those are not both better than the competition, you really don't stand a chance.” She suggests outsourcing photography if that’s an issue. She provides tons of tips for free on her website, and you can watch her videos on YouTube.
Other ways to sell
Etsy’s not the only place to connect with customers. Among other platforms, you can create your own Shopify site, list on your social media, sell in person, show in galleries, hit up retail stores for wholesale orders and list with Amazon (though they’d take a bigger cut, and you can’t dictate your return policies).
With the boost of approaching holidays, about half of my month’s art revenue came from a holiday market benefitting my local Boys & Girls club, but I forked over 25% of my sales over the two days, $117. (I didn’t mind; it was for a good cause.) The Instagram and Etsy ads I bought for to market my irreverent F-word holiday cards cost $50 and $70, but I didn’t make a single sale that way; I did, however, sell three batches of 10 cards to friends who saw them on Facebook for a total of $180, no paid ads required.
Last month I also decided to practice manifestation ala influencer Amanda Francis, and as I delivered four large dishes to a client, I said to myself, “Money is flowing toward me in abundance.” I’d charged my customer $100, which was low considering all the work that went into them, but she is a friend of a friend and a teacher.
When I got back to my car, I heard that delicious little Venmo chime and looked down to see she’d paid me $200. I thought she’d made a mistake. “Nope,” she wrote, “They’re gorgeous and I’m obsessed and I love when I have the means to support artists.” Abundance, indeed.
