Starting a macrame craft small business – January 2022 round up

Starting a macrame craft small business – January 2022 round up:

Hello reader,

I’ve started this blog to document the journey I am currently on; starting a macrame craft business with my very own Etsy shop! I want use this space as a place to document what I have been doing and the things I’m learning along the way. My business is obviously in the very early stages but I’m hoping that writing about my challenges and successes might help or inspire someone looking to do something similar! I also like the thought of having a journal to look back on and see how far I’ve come when I’m having moments of doubt whether I’ve actually accomplished anything. I’m only a month into this journey, but as my head buzzes with all the places I want to go and things I want to do with my business, it’s easy for me to feel like I haven’t done enough or achieved enough so far (spoiler alert: not true at all!!!).

Let’s start from the beginning….

On 31^st December 2021 I went for a hike with my lovely friend Steph, from Ribblehead Viaduct up one of the Yorkshire Peaks. It was a drizzly, cloudy day with absolutely no visibility; not remotely suitable for hiking a mountain. We nearly got blown off the side of the road driving over the Buttertubs Pass to get there, but it was exactly what we needed to blow away the cobwebs of 2021 and make plans for what we wanted to achieve in 2022.

I decided that my New Years resolution for 2022 was to set up an Etsy shop and get my macrame craft business off the ground. Ive been a huge fan of crafting and creating for as long as I can remember – some of my earliest memories are of my Grandma teaching me to knit and sew, and I remember getting the most amazing craft boxes for my birthdays and christmases – anyone else remember foil art!? As an adult, I’ve tried various crafty hobbies such as crocheting and knitting, but macrame caught my eye one day on a shopping trip to TK Max! I’ve been making macrame pieces for the past 5 or 6 years and have sold a few items along the way but I thought it was finally time to get myself out there and see if people wanted to buy what I was creating!

Determined to stay hangover free on the first day of January and get the year off to a fresh start, I spent New Year’s Eve evening at home instead of the pub. I created a logo and a shop banner in Canva, reinstated the Etsy shop that I’d listed a few items on but never sold back in 2020, and deleted all of the instagram posts from my “craft account” ready to start afresh! I was ready to go!

My new logo – not perfect but it will do for now!

On New Years Day I took the plunge and posted a long introduction to my new macrame craft business on instagram, along with the link to my Etsy shop. It was scary but worth it – the response I had from family and friends was lovely, with lots of people sharing my page and telling me they couldn’t wait to see what I was going to sell.

Then I began listing the items that I’d been working on – macrame rainbows! I listed mini rainbow wall hangings, rainbow key-rings, and rainbow bunting. Listing the items was one of the most time consuming aspects – writing sales bios, adding keywords to get noticed by Etsy’s search engine, not to mention the photographs. Taking photographs for me is the WORST part!!! I have done lots of research on how to get your Etsy products to sell and kept seeing how important it is to have good photographs of your product. It’s true, good photographs are what would convince me as a consumer to buy a product, and bad photos would definitely put me off! But waiting for the right lighting and trying to take consistent photos that show off how beautiful a product is, is really really hard! Not to mention I would spend all day making things then realise I couldn’t photograph it until the next day as I had ran out of daylight! So annoying.

My next challenge was to sell said items! I knew to do this I needed an audience, and instagram seemed the best place to grow this. Another lovely friend who is very knowledgeable on instagram growth and engagement informed me that I needed to be making reels. I think my exact response to this was “if you think I’m posting videos of me dancing on instagram, you are wrong”. Luckily that wasn’t required; he explained that I just needed to showcase who I was, what I made, and how I made it in order to draw in viewers to increase my engagement and grow my account. I’ve now posted six reels, done absolutely no dancing in front of a camera, and hit a record of reaching 7000 accounts on one of my latest reels! Not bad I don’t think!

Lots more things have happened this month (including 2 nasty viruses, one of them being COVID!), so I thought I’d do a quick round up of the highs and lows of this month and maybe this can be a new tradition!

January 2022

Highs:

Started a business
Started a new job in a new school!
Sold my first item on Etsy
Sold 17 more items on Etsy
Made over £200 from sales
Reached 700 followers on instagram
Learnt how to make reels (and didn’t have to do any dancing)
Connected with some amazing people through instagram
Accidentally did dry January (not sure if this is a high or low!?)

Lows:

A sickness bug that wiped me out for a week, followed by…
Covid, that also wiped me out for a week
Feeling like I have no idea what I am doing (does anyone though!?)
Very severe lack of socialising.. in fact the only place I’ve been this month is a 5 year olds birthday party at soft play.. but luckily this gave me lots of time for crafting, and I have lots of nice things planned for the coming months!

Looking back I can’t actually believe how busy this month has been and how much I have achieved.