Small Business Log # 003

I don’t know about you, but I love watching the trajectory of someone’s journey. It can be an actual journey or a metaphorical one…it doesn’t really matter, I just enjoy the progression of someone’s dream coming true. In this vein, I thought I’d share my home business journey.

I’m aware that this might wholly back fire. I mean, my dream might not even get off the ground. Thing is, even if the business is a failure, it doesn’t make the journey any less valuable. I’ve been at this for three months now. I have made so many mistakes. But I’ve learnt so much from each one.

I love learning. With this business I have begun at ground zero. I know nothing about running a business. You know what though? I sure am going to have fun learning how to run my fledgling home business!

Achievements in the Month of November 2023

My Etsy Shop

Publicising my little shop remains a huge issue. I have had only 79 visitors to my shop over the whole month. 76% of these came directly from my blog or socials (thank you, lovely readers!) and according to Etsy they have brought 26% of the visitors. But dig a bit deeper and all the people Etsy have brought to me have searched specifically for angelicscalliwagsart. Which basically means, I am bringing all of my traffic to my shop. In terms of showing up in Etsy’s search for actual items, I am not getting a look in.

Christmas Designs

I wasn’t going to do any kind of Christmas collection but I had a few requests so I gave it a go. I painted a scene with a Robin Redbreast and turned it into a variety of Christmas Products. They seem to be doing fairly well as I have sold 25 of them already! I also created some gift tags and stickers in the same design:

I really enjoyed designing the card and so decided to attempt another Christmas design. This time I painted a couple of mice about to kiss under some mistletoe:

I uploaded this design to my shop last Monday, and I have had a verbal order for twenty, but that needs to be confirmed through Etsy. So as things stand, I have not sold any of these yet.

Eco Printer

This month I bought myself an EcoTank printer from Epson. It’s the ET-8550 which prints on A3 and also has a manual rear feeder meaning that I can print on much greater thickness of card.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been replenishing stocks of all my designs. It has been particularly nice to get the formatting correct, and I love the fact that I am fully in control of the whole process now. The printing quality is amazing but I have learnt that it definitely depends on the quality of the paper used. The colour difference between a high quality card and a bog-standard card is quite extreme.

This coming month, I am going to order some sample papers to do a bit of research on the best paper to use as prints. I want to look into offering art prints in the new year, but want to make sure they are as high quality as possible.

Notebooks

This month I have published five more low content journals with Amazon’s KDP. These have been using my Duck painting. I am really happy with how these turned out. Last week, I unpublished all of my journals and then did a U-turn and republished them again. The reason for this is that I use these notebooks to organise each part of my life and they are the perfect size for me. So I guess even if no-one else buys them, I will still use them. So, these Duck Notebooks, Cottage Garden Notebooks and Sea-Life Notebooks will be added to my Etsy shop over the next few weeks:

Each notebook is available with blank pages, lined and blank pages, lined pages, dotted pages and graphed pages.

AngelicscalliwagsArt YouTube Channel

It was with a huge smile on my face that I posted my first video on my new YouTube channel, AngelicscalliwagsArt. Having started a YouTube channel at the beginning of the year to post all my Mesopotamia and Unit Study videos, I was not under any illusion that I was any good at this whole YouTube thing. I’ve posted fairly frequently on my AngelicscalliwagsHomeschool channel. In fact, I’ve posted 31 videos thus far and I have only 53 followers. My videos don’t do horribly, given they are on such a niche topic (Mesopotamia). Most have over 100 views and some have a few hundred. But it has been a bit like pulling teeth!

So, I really didn’t go into my latest YouTube venture with much hope that things would be any different. I have read, however, that one should discount the first 100 videos that one publishes because they will be woeful. Ahem. Yes. I couldn’t agree more regarding myself! That said, there is definite improvement. Although that’s not saying much. I was about as bad as it gets – literally the only way was up!

Now, I’m not saying I’ve set the art world on fire, but I have been surprised by how much more interaction my art videos get compared with my Mesopotamia ones. I guess art is a bit more general than Mesopotamia! I’ve not had any comments on my Mesopotamia channel and very few likes. Not so with my art channel.

Again, so far I only have 24 followers, but it took me months to get to that with my other channel. I only began this channel three weeks ago. Yay me!! (It’s all relative, but I feel like this is going in the right direction!). The views on this new channel are also significantly higher. My last video is on 270 views…in one week! Again, it’s all relative…you may not think this is great, but to me it’s amazing and gives me a little hope that this might go somewhere. And even if it doesn’t, I am thoroughly enjoying all the messages and interactions. The art community on YouTube is really friendly, even for this introvert.

I’m going to be playing about with video ideas before settling on a posting regime. I think I’ll maybe do one longer studio vlog each month and maybe a tongue-in-cheek instructional video (‘cos let’s face it, I’m fumbling around in the dark here, business-wise and probably have very little to offer instructionally speaking). Whatever I decide, I want these videos to be fun and lighthearted. I want to enjoy this whole process, even if it leads nowhere. The thing is, it definitely will go nowhere if I don’t try. Bravery…my new it-word.

Costs During November 2023

This month I have not spent too much on account of last month being very, very expensive! However, I am thinking of the next product I want to make. I’ve had two people ask me to create some book marks, so the first three items are with the goals of doing just that. I bought scales so that I can use Etsy’s postage system which is meant to be cheaper (I shall believe that when I see it!). The long arm stapler is for me to attempt to make my own notebooks so I don’t have to rely on Amazon.

Equipment

Single hole punch = £4.29

200 Mini Tassels = £9.99

Prestige Thick Card = £16.99

Munbyn Digital Postage Scales = £31.99

Long Arm Stapler = £13.99

Total Costs in November 2023 = £77.25

Sales During November

This month I have really struggled to understand Etsy’s fees. There are so many and it is such a complicated process that in my ignorance I got much less than I was expecting. Also, I have been buying off other small businesses from Etsy (products that I already offer or plan to offer in the future) and it has come to my attention that none of them include free shipping. Having looked into it, I am now beginning to understand why.

I included free shipping to the UK and then customer-paid shipping to all other countries. This meant that in order to recoup the shipping and actually make even the smallest of profits, I needed to sell my cards for more than I would have naturally wanted to. Add that to the fact that those in other countries had to then pay shipping on top of an already inflated price, something didn’t sit right.

So, I made the decision to remove free shipping and I reduced my prices from almost £4 a card to £2.80. This means a better deal for those abroad particularly and a bit more transparency for those in the UK. Unfortunately, somehow Etsy removed free shipping to the UK but gave free shipping to the US! Oh my days!! As of last week, I think I now have it sorted and everywhere in the world, including the UK, needs to pay actual shipping costs, but all my products are now priced accordingly. I am much happier about this, and it seems more inline with how other small businesses run their shops on Etsy.

In the future, I may add free shipping over a certain amount, but for now I need to keep things as simple as possible so I can get my head around all the different Etsy fees I have to pay…

So my income for this month is as follows (this is before any Etsy fees are taken off):

Single Greeting Cards x 25 = £2.80 x 25 = £70.00

Packs of 5 Greeting Cards x 2 = £10 x 2 = £20

Sticker Sheets x 4 = £2.80 x 4 = £11.20

Total income for the month of November 2023 = £101.20

This is slightly up on last month.

Thank you to everyone who has ordered from me. I cannot tell you how much it means to me that you are supporting this venture!

Stock Take

Packaging:

• Plain Vellum 90/100
• Glassine Envelopes for stickers 38/50
• Large A5 packing boxes 48/50
• Postmaster A5 card envelopes 43/50
• Medium A6 packing boxes 5/10
• A6 card envelopes 100/100
• Printed Vellum 90/100
• Wooden Stamp 1/1

Products:

• Greeting Cards in 6 designs (50 of each design)

Giraffe = 41/50; Whale = 29/50; Butterfly = 28/50; Woodland = 26/50; Duck = 29/50; Christmas Robin = 10/50; Christmas Mouse = 20/20

• Card Catch Stickers = 130/250
• Sticker sheets in 4 designs (I let each of my girls choose 1 sheet each)

Safari = 44/50; Ocean = 41/50; Woodland = 43/50; Meadow = 44/50

In stock, I have £481.00 worth of sticker sheets and £512.40 worth of greeting cards. This is not profit, just value if I were to sell them all today.

Goals For November – How Have I Done?

• Add one item to my Etsy shop each week
• Record my first video for my new YouTube channel
• Write a business related post every Monday
• Learn how to print out the five designs onto card from home
• I’d like to design some book marks which I plan to print from home.

Goals for December

• Add one item to my Etsy shop each week
• Post one video per week on my art YouTube channel
• Post daily to Instagram
• Do mock ups of my bookmarks

I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing a bit of the behind the scenes of a business. If there is anything else you’d like me to include in these posts, do let me know in the comments.