How DonWillisJrArt pins a catalog of more than 2,000 listings
DonWillisJrArt
DonWillisJrArt has made more than 3,400 sales on Etsy since 2021, mostly embroidered caps and shirts, many with a single bird stitched on the front. With over 2,000 active listings to show, the shop hands its Pinterest posting to Alura's Smart Pins and lets its own Etsy titles do the talking.
A field guide you can wear
DonWillisJrArt sells custom art on things people wear and use: baseball caps, corduroy caps, beanies, tees, hoodies, polos and a few pieces of decor. The biggest group is birds. A Carolina wren, a piping plover, an American woodcock, a gray catbird, a loon, a shoebill stork, each one embroidered on its own on a plain cap. There are dogs too, from a golden retriever holding a golf club to a Scottish terrier, followed by flags, a few famous paintings, a dodo and a printable page for logging bird sightings.
Every order goes into the production queue within 24 hours and is made by a production partner. A line from Van Gogh sits at the top of the shop: "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." It has 689 reviews and a 4.88 star rating.
Every design needs its own pin
Pinterest is a natural home for this catalog. People collect gift ideas and hobby finds there, and a woodcock cap is exactly the sort of thing a birder saves for later. The catch is size. Each listing needs a pin, a board, a title and a description, and new designs keep arriving in batches.
Making pins one at a time works for a shop with a few dozen listings. With more than 2,000, a hand-made schedule can only ever cover a small slice of the catalog, and the newest designs wait their turn behind everything else.
“Every bird has its own fans. Someone who loves plovers isn't going to scroll past wrens to find one, so each design needs to be out there on its own.”
The pins speak in the shop's own words
Today the posting runs through Alura's Pinterest automations. Smart Pins fills a queue with pins built from the shop's active listings, about ten days ahead, ranked mostly by Etsy listing views. A photo pinned in the last week is never reused, so the pins keep moving through the catalog instead of repeating the same caps. Pin New Listings runs alongside it and picks up new designs within a day of them going live on Etsy.
Everything posts to one board, "DonWillisJrArt | Etsy Designs". In the queue, the shop can set how many pins go out a day, on which days and in which time slots, and can reorder pins, edit them or publish one right away.
The telling choice is the pin text. Alura can write titles and descriptions for Pinterest with AI, but the shop uses its Etsy text as written. So a pin reads exactly like the listing it links to.
“My titles already say the bird and the hat style. That's what people type in. I'd rather the pin match the listing they land on.”
Research done while browsing Etsy
Research happens on Etsy itself. With Alura's Chrome extension open on a page of search results, the shop sees a table of the listings on that page, each with a listing report behind it. A shop report is one click away when another seller's catalog is worth studying, and keywords worth coming back to get saved to a research list in Alura. The panel sits on top of Etsy, so the research happens in the same tab as the browsing. It is a quick way to see what Etsy already has for a bird before it goes on a cap.
A board that keeps moving
The Pinterest board keeps getting fresh pins without anyone at the shop building them. Pins on the board read like the shop's own listings: "Piping Plover Embroidered 6-Panel Adjustable Baseball Cap", "Carolina Wren Embroidered 6-Panel Adjustable Baseball Cap" and "Gray Catbird Embroidered Unisex garment-dyed heavyweight t-shirt", each with the opening of its Etsy description underneath: "Celebrate your love for backyard birding and wildlife with this Gray Catbird..."
New caps are what Pin New Listings is built for. The Carolina wren and piping plover caps and the gray catbird tee went up on Etsy and reached the board without a separate trip to Pinterest. The older designs aren't forgotten either. Smart Pins keeps reaching back into the catalog, so the corduroy shoebill stork cap can turn up on the board next to the newest wren cap.
Name the bird exactly
The shop's advice for other sellers with big catalogs has nothing to do with software. Use the name a hobbyist would use, and put the same design on more than one product. The gray catbird is on a cap and a heavyweight tee. The mallard is on a cap and a hoodie. The loon is on a cap and a sweatshirt. One good drawing can meet a buyer on whatever they like to wear, from a cap in summer to a hoodie when the weather turns.
“Call it what birders call it. A Carolina wren isn't a small brown bird. The people who know the difference are the ones who buy.”
DonWillisJrArt received Alura credits as a thank-you for sharing this story.