How BigSkyEmbroidery rewrote its felt mask listings for parents

BigSkyEmbroidery makes dress-up pieces for kids from soft, eco-friendly felt made in the USA. The masks are machine embroidered and sized for the average 2 to 8 year old, with a half-inch elastic band. Tails are cut, stuffed and stitched closed by hand and clip on with a suspender clip. There are paw mittens, bird feet shoe covers with Velcro ankle straps and felt finger puppets for story time, and felt sleep masks with a soft fleece backing for sleepovers and travel.

The range is the remarkable part. Otter, walrus, lemur, hyena, salamander, mosquito, puffin, yeti, cinnamon roll. If a child wants to be it, there's a good chance the shop has made it, and a listing exists for color or pattern changes on anything else. The shop has more than 500 active listings, 1,925 reviews and a 4.9 star rating.

Many of the shop's older listings had titles in the style a lot of Etsy sellers used at the time: one search phrase after another, with no punctuation. The hyena listing read "Hyena Masks Kids Masks Kids Costumes Hyena Mask Felt Mask Animal Mask Halloween mask". The words were all relevant. They just didn't tell a parent much about what would arrive in the mail.

Fixing that once is easy. Fixing it across a catalog where nearly every listing is a different animal, each with its own title, description and 13 tags, is a different job. The descriptions had a version of the same thing. They opened with the fun of dress-up, and the practical facts, like the elastic width and the age range, came further down.

The work happens in Alura's listing editor. Each listing gets a score out of 100, with separate grades for photos, video, title, description and tags, so the thin spots show up before anything is touched.

In Optimization settings, the shop ticks what the AI should work on. Title, description, tags and alt text, the short image descriptions Etsy uses for accessibility. Start optimization writes a draft of each. The draft stays in the editor, where View changes shows exactly what will change. Nothing reaches Etsy until someone clicks Publish changes, and the Listing history dialog can restore an earlier version if a change doesn't sit right.

The titles mostly went live as the AI wrote them. The descriptions got more of the shop's own editing before publishing. On each one, the new opening sits on top and does the practical job: which styles are available, what the mask is made of, how the elastic fits, who it's sized for. The shop's own warmer copy about imaginative play still follows underneath.

Alt text gets the same treatment. Many of the masks share a shape and differ only in color and face, and each photo still needs its own short description. That's typing the AI can take off the shop's hands.

The rewritten titles drop the repeated phrases. Each one names the piece once, says it's embroidered felt, and often adds who it's for or how it fits.

The tags changed the same way. On a dry erase felt coloring book with vehicles on it, broad tags like "toy" and "busy book" gave way to the moments a parent might need one: "car ride activity", "restaurant activity", "quiet time activity", "screen free activity". The kids' sleep masks picked up tags like "sleepover favor" and "travel eye mask" next to the holiday ones.

Descriptions moved the facts up. The heart sleep mask used to open with a promise of better sleep. Now its first lines say it comes in red, pink and black, with a felt front, a fleece backing and a stretchy satin elastic band, and that it's made for adults and children.

Keep a listing for custom changes. BigSkyEmbroidery has one for color and pattern changes on any design, and asks buyers to message first to confirm the change is possible. A parent whose child wants a purple fox has somewhere to go.

And shoot everything the same way. The masks are photographed flat on the same whitewashed wood, so a parent scrolling through dozens of animals can compare them at a glance. When the photos are that consistent, the title and the first lines of the description are what tell one fox from another.