I am opening a crafting eCommerce store!!
Ok so I have had this plan in my head that I wanted to start a little side business in the crafting realm. For nearly a year now I have been going back and forth about which of my many hobbies I would attempt to turn into a profitable business. The key word being profitable, I love crafting and building but I also have to have a budget and actually make enough money for it to make sense. It has taken me a year to come up with what I want to create and sell, now I am not ready to tell you what that is just yet but I can tell you I am most likely going to be using a combination of Etsy and Facebook to sell my products. I am currently working on marketing and budgeting. I have a couple of orders of materials that I am waiting on to complete the first line I will be coming out with in September. YES! I have set deadlines for myself. I want to make money I want to be successful and I want to stay at home 100% of the time with my child and my other day care kids. The only way I will be able to do everything I am dreaming of is if I stay organized and have many small deadlines and keep my expectations low.
I am less than two weeks away from my first child being born and while I am going to be completely focused on her when she is born, I still have some time to kill so continuing my marketing development and creating the prototypes for the line is what I am focusing on right now. I have already made a few and like I said, I am waiting on a little bit more material to come in so I can round out the rest of the line. I have spent many hours learning about branding, marketing, shipping, packaging, and of course smart safe and legal business practices. Since I already have a business license it is easy for me to add this business to the tax forms I already fill out. I am crossing my T's and dotting my I's, to make sure I do this right the first time and come out with profit.
I will go ahead and give you some current number so you have an idea of my total investment so far. I have bought $58.00 of materials for making my products. I have saved carts in various online stores for packaging and shipping materials. I have also spent the last two weeks developing handmade boxes for my product to be shipped in, the material for this I already had so it counts as free. There are several items that I need in order to make my own labels, tags, better boxes, and marketing material. I want as much of what I am selling to be as handmade as possible. A week before my products launch in Etsy, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, they will be given a sneak peek HERE!!! on my blog!! So please subscribe to this blog if you want to see my line first!
I am so happy and excited about my new venture and if any of you have or have had an online store from any website, please give me advice in the comments section I would love to have it.
Thanks for reading,
-Alexandra
