Etsy Seller Interview with Tara of WeePranks

How WeePranks 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?

Hello, my name is Tara. I’m originally from Florida but moved to Scotland 6 years ago after my husband and I got married following a long-distance relationship that started on Minecraft, but that’s another story. My husband used to take part in /r/RandomActsofCards on Reddit, a subreddit where you would send postcards to people across the world and receive cards. He would sometimes make custom, embarrassing postcards tailored to the user's history on Reddit. A few people said he should try selling some of these, but he has a full-time job and doesn’t really have time to find out how to get them professionally produced. 

After COVID started, I was made redundant, so I decided to take some of my husband’s designs and sell them on Etsy. I found a supplier, and he made a few new designs—some embarrassing cards, some nice cards. Our initial investment in the "project" at the time was just £100. We never expected it to blow up so much. The embarrassing postcards sold out while the nice ones hardly sold at all. Thus, we decided to go down the route of embarrassing cards, eventually branching out to other prank products such as prank envelopes, prank DVD "rentals," and prank packages. We recently expanded into novelty gifts and purchased a 3D printer last week to expand further!

Favorite items

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

It was hard to pick a couple of favorites out of over 200 products, so here’s one from each of our main categories! Please note that many of our items are NSFW and contain crude adult humor. Don’t check it out if you’re easily offended or if you’re at work!  I think this is probably my favorite of the postcards we sell, as it’s quite unique and inclusive of all genders. We have a mail-order wife too, but that feels quite ubiquitous. Unfortunately, our prank postcards have been overshadowed by our other prank products, despite being one of our lowest-cost pranks.

This was one of our first DVD rental pranks. It’s a simple design that attracts a lot of attention. It has been sold 306 times at the time of this writing.

This one is new, added with the last new batch of pranks. I think I’d highlight it as one of my favorites because of how ridiculous it sounds, yet such things do exist... It has not yet sold as of today, but that does not diminish our enthusiasm for it, as every product had its first sale at some point.

This one has gained us a lot of views on TikTok and brought a lot of traffic over. To imagine a postman reading this and then delivering it is hilarious. We have since created a postie, postwoman, and postperson version to cater to all types of posties.

Our novelty gifts are new to the store, but this one is my favorite—especially in times of financial crisis. Who wouldn’t want to grow a money tree right now? This is our most popular novelty gift since we put it up.

We loved designing this one; it sells quite often. Prank envelopes and novelty gifts are among the few products we print at home on a home printer, which means we will always have an unlimited supply of envelopes on hand. G

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 husband opened an Etsy store in 2015 but didn’t make any sales from the couple of digital files he sold. We rebranded the store in 2020 to WeeSmilesScotland when we started selling prank postcards, then to WeePranks in 2023. The rebranding to "WeePranks" was a decision made to make the store more attractive to an international audience rather than give the impression we only sold within the UK. It took about 2 weeks for us to make our first sale of a prank postcard after I took a course on SEO optimization on Udemy. My husband was amazed that one of his postcards actually sold, having tried to sell sketches and commissions in the past but been unsuccessful. Now, we attract people to the store via TikTok. One of our videos hit over a million views and brought a lot of traffic. That was a very busy week!

Managing WeePranks

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 manage the store, arrange supplies, send sales, etc. My husband designs the products for me to sell. In managing the store, we use Vela, a great tool to edit listings in bulk. This tool has enabled us to edit more than 200 listing descriptions at once. For determining our SEO rankings, we use Marmalade. We only take a month’s subscription when we’ve released a batch of new products. Our most important tool is Canva. We pay the monthly fee for premium membership to Canva, which gives commercial rights to many graphics that are utilized in our products. Finally, we also use Grammarly. We are both dyslexic and prone to spelling and grammar mistakes. We can’t rely on each other to check spelling and punctuation either, so Grammarly is a lifesaver. It has sometimes missed mistakes, though, and we’ve ended up with a bad batch of misspelled products! As for shipping, we use Etsy labels and send via Royal Mail. I edit the Etsy labels to remove Etsy branding and return addresses to make them anonymous. I usually do this every other day and take them to the nearest post office. I’m too embarrassed to send them via the post office!

The future of WeePranks

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

We just bought a 3D printer last week, and my husband is taking a course on creating 3D objects. We hope to integrate 3D printing as part of the shop, printing novelty items, gifts, and pranks. At the moment, we’re practicing with the printer and Blender before we start selling things, though we’ve seen on printables.com some designs we plan to sell that have commercial rights that are available for free. Although others can easily download and also sell these products, we feel we can bring in traffic with our unique prank products and sell them as add-ons. We also wish to reinvest some profits in the future to buy our own commercial printer, removing the "middleman" and leaving us a bit more of the profit. We’d also like to explore selling at physical markets—keeping our NSFW items in folders marked 18+ and monitoring people browsing. From there, we could take payment and give a receipt, then produce and send the pranks from home to the address they provide.

Advice for new sellers

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

Stay at it.  The feeling of making the first sale was amazing. I went from being laid off to earning the same amount of money as I did at my part-time job.I’m now a full-time student studying history while managing the store. I wouldn’t have had enough time to pursue a better career opportunity if it weren’t for making enough income with Etsy to support us.

Learn SEO (search engine optimization). It’s far more important than you realize, and there are tools out there that give you ratings for your listing’s SEO. Marmalade is expensive, but it is well worth it in my opinion.eRank is free, but personally, I don’t find it as intuitive as Marmalade.

Finally, make something unique. There are a thousand people out there selling nice greeting cards, and a thousand more selling t-shirts with simple designs. You need to stand out and be unique. Don’t compare your shop to others, and don’t steal ideas from others. Etsy is a marketplace for people who want something different from your usual bunch of products.

Important Info

We take harassment very seriously. If any order contains a message or prank that appears to be hateful, threatening, or abusive, it will be canceled. Of course, we don't know the relationship between two parties; therefore, something that may be hateful to one person may be a joke to another. In Scotland, culturally, it's generally accepted to have a bit of back-and-forth "banter" with a friend, but anything that appears to take it a bit too far will be canceled. 

All items are intended to be a joke, and it's the buyer's responsibility to ensure the recipient has the sense of humor to interpret their gift as a joke. The buyer takes full responsibility for sending the joke(s). We will comply with all police requests.

We've been contacted by the police before by someone who was being harassed by an ex.We will always follow GDPR regulations.

The UK GDPR does not prevent you from sharing personal data with law enforcement authorities (known under data protection law as "competent authorities") who are discharging their statutory law enforcement functions. The UK GDPR and the DPA 2018 allow for this type of data sharing where it is necessary and proportionate.

Do not use our store to send things with ill intent.

Some sellers really get inspired by hearing numbers. Feel free to share these if you like.

Question: What is your shop’s conversion rate?
Answer: 2.3%