How BoardGameSolutions got started

Introduce your Etsy shop and tell us your story. How did you begin and decide on what to sell on Etsy, and how do you create your products?

Hi, I’m Sarah, and I run BoardGameSolutions with my husband and our two dogs, Lucy and Willow. We make accessories for board games and tabletop gaming from our home/workshop in Newcastle, UK.

It all started when we got engaged in 2016, and it was around this time that we both discovered a mutual love of board games, so we began looking online for accessories, and found either not what we were looking for, or the items we wanted didn’t ship to the UK. We were mainly looking for bags to draw tiles from (think like the bag you use when playing Scrabble but customized to the games we were playing), and a tray to roll the dice on to stop an eager puppy from grabbing the dice off the table!

From an early age, I loved crafts in general, and my Grandma taught me how to sew, so I began to make accessories for us to use ourselves. Then, on a cold January night in 2017, we decided to try selling some of the bags I was making to help raise some wedding funds and also help people looking for these types of products and having the same issues we were having, so worldwide shipping and affordably priced items were our starting point, and it is still something we aim for with each and every new product today.

Fast forward to 2019, we got married in March, then by July the store was continuing to grow month by month, so we made the leap and bought a house with a dedicated craft room for me and space to expand into the garden, and I quit my 9-5 office job to run the Etsy store full time. 2020 saw us expand into wooden gaming accessories with the completion of our garden woodworking area, and in 2022 we’re continuing to develop new products with the aim of my husband joining me in working on the business full time one day.

Favorite items

What are your favorite items? What makes these so special? Why do you think these items might be selling well?

It all started with drawstring storage bags, and they’re still one of my favorite things to make! Our current bags are still the same basic shape they always were, but with the addition of our fabric printer, we can now print our own designs and patterns, and this Dungeons and Cats bag (a play on Dungeons and Dragons!) is one of my favorite designs.

Cat D&D Dice Bag

I also love our new wooden gaming accessories, especially our two-tier card holder. I use this myself on a lot of our game nights. It makes a hand of cards a lot easier to manage!

Two Tier Board Game Card Holder

As we have the ability to print fabric and cut our own wood, we can bring to life any design we want to, and being able to create unique and affordable designs like these is one of the reasons we started, and it’s great to still be making products like these that people also want to buy. Our Dungeons and Cats bag even has an Etsy Best Seller badge!

Getting sales on Etsy

How long did it take for you to earn your first sale and how do you currently attract customers to your Etsy shop?

We started with five patterned storage bags, and it was exactly two weeks before we had our first sale, and I actually did a little happy dance! It was such an exciting moment to know that something I’d made was going off to someone! We didn’t have any friends or family that shared our love of board games, so in the beginning, each and every sale was a new customer who found us organically, but we’ve been lucky enough to make friends in the area through the shop, and we have a key group of repeat customers too!

These days, the majority of our sales come through Etsy SEO. I aim to spend 15-20 minutes every day checking our top 5 keywords that most of our items fall under to make sure our listings are showing up, and I make tweaks to tags and descriptions to keep on top of things. It’s a super competitive market that can sometimes seem to grow by the day, so it’s good to keep an eye on where we are.

Managing BoardGameSolutions

How do you manage your shop? Are you running solo or do you have any team members? What tools or services do you use to run your shop and how do you handle fulfillment?

In terms of the making of the items, my husband makes the wood items and I do the rest! My old 9-5 office job was in the print industry, and as part of that I ran the online sales of merchandise for one of my clients, so unbeknownst to me at the time, this was teaching me the skills I needed to run my own business, such as shipping and fulfillment, as well as inventory management and stockists for things like packaging supplies and flyers.

Some of the tools you need for day-to-day orders can be found within Etsy itself. I just use Google Sheets (a free online spreadsheet tool) to monitor my expenses, etc., and I use Adobe Photoshop for all my design work. My workspace itself has my laptop, fabric printer, heat press (for printing fabric), sewing machine, embroidery machine, Cricut, and desktop printer. It’s a very cozy craft space! Out in the shed we have our laser cutter and glue station for our wooden products, and yes, the shed even has heating and WiFi for those cold dark nights in the run up to Christmas when our dice trays prove to be a popular gift!

If you’re a seller based in the UK, I can highly recommend using Royal Mail’s click and drop service. It’s an online integration that you set up with Etsy, and not only does it allow you to pay and print your shipping labels online, but you can also drop off your items at the Royal Mail delivery office, instead of having to go to the post office and queue with the people drawing money out and renewing their driver’s licenses etc!

The future of BoardGameSolutions

What goals do you have for your shop in the future?

It’s been an amazing journey seeing my shop grow from 2017-2019 where I was able to hang up my high heels and quit my 9-5 office job to run this full time, and after having gotten through the last 2 years of uncertainty, I hope to get us back onto a growth path again so my husband can join me in running the business full time.

Waking up each day knowing I get to sit in my craft room with our two puppers for company is not something I’ll ever take for granted, and I really hope we can continue to move in the right direction to keep doing what I love every day.

Advice for new sellers

What’s your advice for a new seller starting an Etsy shop?

If you’re just starting out on this journey, take the time to see what’s already out there, and look at what you can offer to improve on that, either in functionality or cost. For us, it was definitely making something affordable to make and also ship-whenever me or my husband come up with a new product idea, he is always asking "will this improve the gameplay for x game", whereas I’m always asking "will it ship as a royal mail large letter price bracket"?

The market today is much more heavily saturated than it was 5 years ago, so doing what you can to make your product stand out from the crowd is the best way to get found. This could be through having eye-catching photos, or offering your own unique take on an existing item or product. Be aware of other sellers in your area too! Don’t spend $$$ on marketing and social media promos if everyone else is also doing the same, it’ll just mean no one gets seen!

It can be overwhelming when first starting out to try and build your store up to meet those already established, so try to aim to complete one task a day. Even now, five years later, I still aim to list new products every week. This could just be a new design or color for a current product, but for me it helps keep our store fresh in the minds (and inboxes) of people who follow us, and it’s a great excuse to do a social media post too!