Digital Product Or Physical Products

Although I have experience in selling both physical and digital products (my 6-figure Etsy shop sells jewelry), I don’t want to ship physical products in 2020 because of the disruption of international shipping during the pandemic.

So I opted for digital products. It has the potential of being quite ‘passive’, meaning that I can create the design once and sell it for a long time. Also, being able to work anywhere in the world is tempting; I won’t be tied down to one location.

Some other benefits that makes me go with digital products:

• Low production and start-up costs
• Customers get the designs instantly
• Potentially high profit margin as the production cost is low
• Won’t run out of stock

Niche Selection

Because of the pandemic, I’ve noticed the jobs of many people are being affected and they are staying at home more. They want to make extra income.

Etsy, being one of the biggest online retail places, is getting a lot of growth. And that means it’s likely that more people are creating handmade products to earn some extra side income.

So I thought, why don’t I create products to help other sellers. And one of the biggest difficulties I face when I first started my business was getting the branding and brand image right.

One of the basis of a successful business is to help people. If your shop can help solve customers problems and make their lives better, you have a good chance of success.

Many new sellers face the problem of not knowing what to do about branding and product packaging. And getting a designer to help can cost a fortune.

I want to help them solve that problem.

And that’s how Growing Your Craft was born. A brand that is dedicated in helping small businesses to grow their craft business, by offering branding designs that are professional and affordable.

Initial Brainstorm Of Product Ideas

My logic is simple. Because my target audience consists mostly of people trying to sell on Etsy, why not research the popular products on Etsy as they are likely what they will be trying to make.

Some popular product categories include skin care products, body care products, candles, etc. Let’s take candle as an example. If you want to start a new candle shop, you would want your candles to have nice packaging like the ones you see in big retail shops. And for that, one of the best solution would be to have a modern, professional label design to stick on the candle container.

Therefore, making label designs for various products that can help them rival big retail brands is one of the main goals.

Another big category of products includes branding designs that most Etsy shops will need, like business cards, Etsy shop branding kits and thank you cards.

Researching What Works In The Market

After knowing a list of products that I can potentially sell, I start researching them on Etsy to see how viable they are.

One thing to keep in mind when you start is to do this research in different browsers and do it when you are logged out of an Etsy account. This will give you the most accurate results. 

At the time when I started the shop, there was only a handful of big sellers in the printable product label niche. From my memories, there were only a few sellers with over 200-300 reviews, and other sellers only had fewer than 100 reviews. This to me indicates that the niche was not too saturated.

Another thing that I noticed is that a lot of the designs are very similar. Many designs are in the black and white ‘modern, minimalist’ style. It’s true that they are versatile and look good on many products, more colourful designs can potentially stand out in a sea of monochrome ones.

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Although people say ‘don’t break what works’, my instinct tells me that there is room for a different style of label design. Think about it, when you go in a supermarket or a beauty store, you don’t just see one style of design in the packaging. You see different styles of packaging. For a natural brand, they use earthy colours with nature graphics like leaves. And for a more feminine brand, you can imagine a blush pink design with cursive font will be appropriate.

Finalising Product Categories To Start

When starting an Etsy shop, I recommend having at least 30-50 products so that you can cover a good range of keywords.

I have decided to start with 5 categories and about 5-10 products in each category.

So I wouldn’t be able to create all the products I want in the beginning because that would take too long. I need to pick the products that should have the best chance of success.

I need to pick the products that are high in demand with reasonable competition to get good initial traction.

As mentioned before, for picking products that are high in demand, I look at the popular items on Etsy. Some of them include candle labels, essential oil label and skin care product labels. Another indicator of whether that niche is popular is looking at the number of products with the ‘bestseller’ badge.

For competition, I looked at the number of results in a particular keyword, and the number of sellers having high number of sales/reviews. 

For example, the keyword ‘essential oil label’ has fewer than 5000 product results, which means it’s feasible for even a new seller if I can come up with competitive products.

I also included Etsy branding kit (Etsy banner, shop icon, etc) and business card designs in my first batch of products to make because most new Etsy shop owners would be interested in them.