How Strong Confident YOU 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?

When I was 15 years old, I started a business with my mom,  embellishing all sorts of items with Swarovski crystals including phone cases, shirts, bridesmaids gifts, etc. It was a great first experience to learn what it takes to run a business. I knew at a very early age that I was going to be my own boss one day and I always knew in my heart that the right opportunity would present itself if I kept my eyes open and was willing to work hard at anything I tried.

The big break came when I learned about Etsy. Listing your work on Etsy was quite frankly, a lot easier than having to get traffic to your own website when just starting out. 

My mom, who is also my best friend, and my boyfriend at the time (now husband) were on board right away to open our first shop on Etsy. I am very lucky to have such a supportive family who trusts me whenever I come up with a new (sometimes crazy) idea for our business and this was the start of it all. 

We already had crystal embellished bridal shirts on our website so it was the natural progression of what we would sell first in our shop.  Very soon after, I came up with the idea to offer vinyl printed shirts to our bridal customers as well because so many of them wanted a customized date or a name and this was very time consuming in crystals. 

Once fall arrived, I started to panic because I thought nobody was going to buy any bridal items in the winter. While I was overreacting a bit, I am glad that this fear led us to branching out into numerous other special occasions and everyday comfy shirts from pregnancy announcements to gifts for mother’s day and sarcastic tees our customers come back for every year. 

When we started out with vinyl shirts, I didn’t even know how to write something in photoshop or illustrator, let alone design my own shirts and make graphics! My husband taught me the basics and soon after, I taught myself  more advanced techniques by trial and error and lots of Googling. 

These days, we still do some custom work with vinyl, especially for glitter and metallic foil prints but we have upgraded to Direct To Garment printing for most items. 

Most designs are designed by me to this day, a select few are purchased from artists who sell commercial licenses. Being a Mama of 2 sweet ladies has made me slow down in the design department for a little while but I am back to designing full time as of this month, now that they are in Pre-K and Kindergarten for most of the day. 

We started out with a very tight budget, just a few shirts in stock and reinvesting every penny in the first year into expanding our stock. Now, we work with around 5 of the largest wholesale apparel companies and have personal relationships with each. I still have to pinch myself sometimes when I walk through our shelves of literally thousands of shirts we keep in stock.

Through the pandemic, we have at least quadrupled our stock to ensure we truly have everything available that we offer in the shop and we are quite successful at this.

Favorite items

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

My absolute favorite designs in the shop will always be our maternity designs. I came up with many of them when I was pregnant and they have been seasonal bestsellers year after year. 

There is something so special about knowing that these shirts are used by so many to tell their husband, mother, sister, etc. that a new life will be joining the family.

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 never expected this to take off so fast but I remember that we made our first sale on the first day of our shop opening. For the whole year after that, we always had at least one sale a day, often many more. We often talk about how sweet that feeling was when the first sales started coming in.

Currently, we have so many different channels that lead to our shop. We have over 100K followers on Facebook, around 60K followers on Instagram and a ton of traffic coming from Pinterest Pins, which is why it is important to make your listings “pretty for pinning”. 

We also have a lot of repeat customers which makes us so very proud, since they must really love our shirts to come back for more often. Some come back every single year for Holiday shirts or for their 2nd, 3rd or even 4th baby announcement and it’s just so cool to be a part of their life in this little way.

Managing Strong Confident YOU

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?

For quite a while, it was just myself, my mom and my husband doing absolutely everything in the shop. Then, about 3 years into the business, we grew to 10 employees. Once we moved to Las Vegas from Wisconsin, we actually consciously downsized to just us 3 again, working day and night to get orders out while managing life as new parents. 

The plan was to start hiring again at the beginning of 2020 but when the pandemic hit, we didn’t want to add employees to our tight workshop so we managed everything ourselves until July 2020 when we added 3 team members within 1 week.

We are now in a 8500+ sq. ft. building with 9 employees and currently hiring for several positions. Between our 2 Etsy shops (Strong Confident You and Heart Your Tees), our local business is starting to blossom as well here in Las Vegas.

For shipping, we use Shipstation, which we have found works quite well for our high volume shipping. As many have probably seen in the news, the USPS and other carriers are experiencing a lot of delays so we do everything to send most packages out within 2 days, even during the busiest season to help the customer out with the possible delay in shipping times. 

The future of Strong Confident YOU

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

We love to set goals and from day one, we are amazed that we have always surpassed them much faster than we could ever imagine. The immediate goal is honestly to make it through the Holiday season with the shipping delays that are happening nationwide. We will all jump on the production and shipping train if needed to get those packages out asap for our customers. 

Our hope is that they will appreciate our dedication and that they will understand that once a package leaves our workshop, it is unfortunately out of our hands how fast it moves. 

The goal for next year (2022) is to keep growing our Strong Confident You shop with lots of new designs as well as Heart Your Tees, which we had to close for a year during the pandemic in order to handle all the Strong Confident You orders by ourselves. 

The next goal will be to finally open a Baby and Kid’s Etsy shop which has been in the works for quite a while.

Advice for new sellers

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

Ask yourself this question if you want to start an Etsy shop: Do you want this to be a hobby or a business? 

If you decide that you want to grow it into a business, give it your all. Re-invest as much as you can for the first few months to a year before paying yourself a penny, if you can. Dedicate your everything to creating, listing and selling your products. Try to grow to at least 100 listings of a nice variety pretty fast, you will be taken much more seriously as a business and customers will trust you faster. 

If you want this to be a full-time business, you will also have to balance between creating items you love and creating items you know will appeal to a broader audience. I still design shirts today that I know simply will not sell but I love them and I make them for myself.

When designing for the shop, I put my personal preference or taste aside at times to make products I know will sell. Once you start to see growth, be prepared to work day and night, weekends and holidays for a while. 

Do not hire right away, try and make it work with just yourself or your family members for a while until your profits are solid and you can consistently get a certain amount of sales. 

Don’t expect this to be a 9-5 job. While it does get “easier”, 10 years into it, we are still working a lot more than your normal 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.