Etsy Seller Interview with Regina of RPNYDesign

How RPNYDesign 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?

My name is Regina Pauly, and I’m the creator and owner of RPNY Design on Etsy. I’m an artist and writer who lives in New York City. I create minimalist line art of anything you can imagine, from celebrities to food to animals to zodiac signs. I’m lucky that I can use, quite literally, anything and everything around me as inspiration; no matter how complex the subject, it can always be stripped down to its simplest form with just a few well-placed lines. In December of 2017, I created my first line drawing ever. The piece was line art of a horse, and I gifted that piece to an acquaintance for Christmas. They liked it so much, they asked if I had any others they could buy. Seeing as that was my first piece, I obviously didn’t have any others, but that encouraged me to try my hand at line art and see if anyone else wanted to buy my art. I started posting my line art on RPNY Design’s Etsy page in January 2018. This was also the exact time I uprooted my life and moved to NYC.

It was a hectic time in a hectic city, so creating line art actually became very therapeutic for me. I carried my iPad and Apple Pencil with me everywhere and would whip them out to create a new piece pretty much anywhere at any time. The fact that line art allowed me to concentrate on something so simple relieved a lot of the stress that comes with creating art. I wasn’t making a masterful painting or writing the next great American novel. I was stringing a couple of lines together to mellow out my mind and document the world around me, and if that resulted in a drawing of a strawberry or a deer, then all the better! And if it didn’t result in a drawing of an object, person, animal, etc., then I chalked it up to being an abstract line piece. Art doesn’t have to make sense, and when you’re only using a few lines here and there, you leave your art very open to interpretation.

A month after creating that line-horse for a Christmas gift, I was selling my art on Etsy. At the time, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. This meant that I didn’t have a lot of room to create, so that helped me decide to sell my art only as digital downloads. I didn’t have the space for a printer, reams of paper, or safe storage for my pieces. I told myself that I would eventually move into physical prints, but sticking to digital downloads, even five years later, was the best decision for me as a seller. It allows me to sell my art passively, create new pieces much faster, and stay environmentally conscious by not using or wasting paper and ink. And, while the pieces on my Etsy profile operate passively, I still create custom pieces for customers all the time, which keeps me artistically fresh and allows me to develop relationships with customers.

Favorite items

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

Some of my favorite items in my shop are found in the Women Series, which houses the first few pieces I created for Etsy.

This woman print is one of my favorite prints in my shop, as is this print, which was the first piece I created for my shop! Not only do these pieces hold a sentimental meaning to me, but they also emit a sense of feminine power despite being artistically delicate and simple. 

But certain items that sell the best in my shop are also some of my favorites, for example,  this palm tree piece and this buffalo piece. These are both two of my favorites, and based on how well they sell, they’re customers’ favorites as well!

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?

I had my first sale about an hour after I posted my first print. I remember being so excited that not only did someone want to spend their hard-earned money on something I made, but that it happened so quickly. Having the items in my shop be digital downloads definitely contributed to my first sale coming so quickly. Now, I attract customers via Instagram, SEO on Pinterest and Etsy, and word of mouth. I’ve had a lot of people message me about ordering a custom print because they saw one of my prints at their friend’s house. To me, word of mouth is the most touching form of advertising.It doesn’t involve numbers and algorithms (although those are really helpful); it involves people being together and talking about art.

Managing RPNYDesign

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?

RPNY Design is a one-woman show! I do everything myself, from creating the art to managing the shop to marketing my products to maintaining customer relations. There have been times in the last 5 years where I have seriously considered hiring some help for RPNY Design, but, as a self-proclaimed control freak, I always decided against it. When it comes to art, I don’t think there’s anyone better to manage that art than the artist. By running this whole operation myself, I get to stay connected with the art I make, develop personal relationships with customers, and make decisions quickly without conferencing with anyone else.

Again, because my products are all digital downloads, the tools I use are all digital as well. I don’t have to worry about having a paper supplier, conversing with shipping companies, or working with print shops. My tools are almost all apps. I use the Adobe Illustrator app to create all of my pieces. I use Adobe Creative cloud to upload and store all of my pieces. And, I use Gmail to send out any custom orders to customers. The only physical tools that I use are my iPad and Apple Pencil, which make creating my line drawings easy and actually pretty fun.

The future of RPNYDesign

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

I’d really like to start incorporating text prints into my shop along with my line art. There are so many quotes, mottos, lyrics, etc. that I think deserve to be seen as works of art. I would also like to try selling a few limited-edition physical prints. I still plan to stay in the digital download sphere, but offering some of my best-selling prints as physical copies in very limited quantities would be fun for me to try out.

Advice for new sellers

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

There is a niche for everything. Your art doesn’t have to appeal to the masses. No matter how oddly specific or small a niche is, there are people in that niche. And you could be the person to make art that speaks to that little pocket of people. So, if you feel like you should make a drawing of a dog but you actually want to make a drawing of a duck in a cowboy hat having tea with a narwhal, draw the duck. Someone out there will be elated and grateful that you created that piece of art.

In terms of marketing, I can’t tell you how beneficial Pinterest has been for me and my Etsy shop. It’s a long and tedious process to upload every individual item to Pinterest with a corresponding Etsy link to that piece, but it’s worth it. Once your products are on Pinterest, the marketing happens for you. Those pins of your items are circulated throughout Pinterest to millions of potential customers, and it’s all done by Pinterest users, not you.

Lastly, don’t expect this to be fun all of the time, especially if you’re selling art. Artists are often encouraged to focus on making the art, which is nice in theory. But if you want your art to make money, you have to think like a businessperson as well. You must be willing to do both the fun part of creating art and the difficult part of running a business.