Etsy Seller Interview with Emma of LittleRedAppleCards

How LittleRedAppleCards got started

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

I’d made handmade cards for friends and family occasionally for years, and after being unable to find birthday cards for kids that I liked locally, I decided to design my own. My cards quickly gained popularity, and I began doing markets and stocking a few shops.The next step was to open an Etsy shop, as it has such a great, ready-made, worldwide audience. As my orders grew, I began getting my designs printed instead of making each card laboriously by hand. I still make all the original card designs by hand with cut paper collage, then scan the original and have it reproduced onto responsibly sourced card stock by a small family-run printer.

As I enjoyed this creative process so much, I wanted to add to my range and expand my skills. I began decorating wooden shapes to make brooches, and now I have a wide range of painted wooden jewellery that I design and hand-make. I have the pieces laser-cut locally from FSC-certified wood. I like to keep things local, ethical, and environmentally friendly; that’s a key thing for me, and that includes keeping my packaging minimal and recyclable. Across both cards and jewelry, my style is clean, fresh, fun, and colourful with simple shapes and silhouettes.

Favorite items

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

I loved designing this range with watercolour stripes and hand-cut, slightly wonky paper letters. It’s really simple but a bit unusual and has been a hit with customers.

These hand-painted little wooden studs in a leopard print pattern provide a little hit of colour and fun. These items both sparked a whole range of similar items as they sold very well. I now have cards with the same style but with different recipients and colorways, as well as a whole selection of leopard-print hand-painted jewellery. These items have been successful on Etsy, at markets, and in brick-and-mortar stockists, which is great (and not always the case). I do find that different places I sell my work have customers who prefer different things. But perhaps these items meet a need in the market and provide something that hits the spot.

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?

My Etsy shop was definitely slow to start! It was a steep learning curve for me and took a while to start getting regular sales—the first two or three years were very slow until I became more focused on learning more about how Etsy works. I also worked hard on improving my photography, and my shop gradually improved and grew organically.

I have quite a few repeat customers, which makes me very happy. If things are quiet, I'll do some low-budget Etsy advertising, and I get traffic from social media and people who've seen my products in stores or at markets. Adding new products and improving listings seem to help with visibility. It’s also important to keep up with the changes and new things that Etsy introduces.

Managing LittleRedAppleCards

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?

I’m the only person in my business, so it’s all on me, from designing and making to marketing, accounting, and order fulfillment. I love the variety! I work from an office at my home, with stock and materials also on site. As my cards are printed by an external company, I hold stock of them, but I have a variety of spreadsheets to help with tracking sales and inventory. This helps me forecast demand and make things run efficiently without holding too much stock. I also keep some stock of my jewellery made up and ready to go to minimise lead times for customers and be ready for stockist top-ups and selling at markets without too much prep.

The tools and apps I use are very basic; I’m a pretty low-tech person, and I love a notebook and pen, although I couldn’t be without my Excel spreadsheets! Canva is a brilliant free resource for creating graphics. In terms of designing, I get my ideas down initially with a pencil and paper. Every day, I pack and ship orders myself. Getting orders to my customers as quickly as possible is really important to me.

The future of LittleRedAppleCards

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

I’d love to keep growing, up to a point! My business is so flexible and fits around my family, which is perfect for me. I’m very happy to keep it a one-woman business, but we all want to keep improving. Streamlining my range and designing some new earring styles is next on the list for me.

Advice for new sellers

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

Don’t underestimate the amount of work! You can’t set it up, sit back, and watch the orders roll in (unless you’re very lucky!). You need to keep tweaking your listings and making changes, e.g., to keywords. A cohesive visual identity is attractive to customers, and photography is super important for this. Having bright, clear images and different types of shots is a must, and having your own style that provides a link between various items in your shop is helpful to your brand.