Etsy Seller Interview with Brian of CircumnavigatePrints

How CircumnavigatePrints 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?

I’m Brian, the owner of CircumnavigatePrints on Etsy. We sell coastal and water-related digital artwork to help soothe nervous systems. My family loved going to the beach in the past and my son, who is neurodivergent, has always been fascinated by water. I had to shift to more of a caregiving role to help support him and I needed an option to maintain flexibility while allowing me to draw on some of my existing skill sets and allow for growth and experimentation with AI.

When getting started, I think I modeled after Alek Sheffy’s approach and added in some seasoning from Dylan Jahraus and just got started after doing research with Answer the Public.

I still use Answer the Public before I sit down to create any new imagery. I have a custom image generation prompt that I worked out after a long period of trial and error that I use to bring my ideas/sketches partly to life in the way that I want and then I use other tools to do the final touches.

Favorite items

What are your favorite items? What makes these so special? Why do you think these items might be selling well?
There’s a painting of an American bullfrog that is probably my favorite, because that is my son’s favorite animal and one of his special interests. He loves animals, so any of the artwork featuring an animal is a silent ode to him.

The first mangrove image I ever listed is another favorite because it reminds me of winters along the Florida coast with my family when I was home on leave.

Relatively speaking, they sold okay, likely due to iterating on what was already working.

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 had our first sale during the first week that we had serious listings up. Right now it’s almost exclusively organic traffic through Etsy with occasional bumps from Pinterest,

Managing CircumnavigatePrints

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?

It’s mostly just me. My son gives me feedback and inspiration on a lot of the artwork. I had a big assist from the great team at Link My Books recently, who really helped me streamline the financials. When I was first setting up the shop and dialing things in, Alura’s Listing Helper and Shop Analyzer were invaluable in helping me identify what I was doing wrong and any oversights with the listings. I wrote a handful of custom scripts to automate a lot of the time-consuming processes. I haven’t had the bandwidth to expand into physical products for the shop and have remained solely digital.

The future of CircumnavigatePrints

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

I’d like to bring the vibrancy back into the shop and shake off this hibernation. My goal right now is to keep the shop going so that any nervous system that finds the artwork soothing can find it.

Advice for new sellers

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

Focus on what matters. Follow the data. Be prepared for the Valley of Despair if you haven’t visited already. Try new things. Don’t be too hard on yourself.