Etsy Seller Interview with Clifford of Amuzigu

How Amuzigu 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 to all, I’m Clifford and my Etsy shop is called Amuzigu, which means to Amuse or Have Fun in Esperanto. If you’re not familiar with Esperanto, look it up online…it’s a pretty cool language. But that’s for another interview. Until recently, I had a sister shop as well named TotientCraft, which primarily featured math and science items. I opted to merge this smaller shop into Amuzigu. So now there’s something for everyone. It’s confusing, or what I choose to call Eclectic.

If I were a superhero, my origin story would be always doing something other than what I’m supposed to be doing. Going back in time 15 years, this translates into coming up with odd jewelry ideas rather than doing the software development work I was being paid for. Though I started making cool stuff earlier, this more or less is when I started on Etsy. These first jewelry products featured one thousand tiny text characters in a pendant area of less than 1 square inch. For example, customers could choose a 1,000-character description of their zodiac sign, the first 1,000 digits of Pi, or a variety of other selections. The pendant text was printed at 1pt in size. I was hooked.

Continuing the superhero analogy, my superpower is working with gazillions of tiny text characters or digits. From these jewelry ideas, I went on to create posters with millions of characters as well as books with as many as 100 million digits of Pi. There was a 1-billion-digit coffee table book in the works, but after making a couple of prototypes, I decided to keep this one to myself.

Back to the present day, my shop is an eclectic mix of some of these original “tiny text” products along with lighter/funnier items such as shirts, mugs, and memo pads. The “tiny text” products include literature posters containing entire works of literature printed on them, as well as 100,000 digits of Pi.

To be candid, I no longer produce as many of my products. It’s simply about downsizing – I have a goal of being a “Digital Nomad” one day, and so I can’t have that 700-pound printing press in the kitchen, or the industrial paper cutters in the bedroom, or the padding press in the living room if I’m going to accomplish that. All of my products are designed by yours truly, however.

Favorite items

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

There are a few items of mine that I would say are my favorites. And No, not all of them sell well, or at all. One such favorite, which is a throwback to my tiny text days, is the Literature Poster section in my shop. I’m really happy with how my The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as well as Romeo and Juliet poster designs turned out. They are 24 x 36 inches, printed on a beautiful stock, with the entire works printed on the poster. They contain key images from the works as well. So far though…I seem to like them more than potential customers. I have some hanging in my house.

My biggest seller recently, and also among my favorite designs, are my food memo pads. People love my pickle pads! I’ve recently added new cookie designs, which are my official favorites. They feature more than 10 original darn cute cookie cartoon characters and a saying such as “I’m One Tough Cookie.” There are a few varieties that I hope to catch on soon, as did the pickle pads. I also offer printable versions of many of these memo pads, as well as other products displaying these original characters.

Why certain products sell better than others is still a mystery to me. I haven’t yet cracked the code. I’m many things, but I am no marketing guru. If you must know, it’s my kryptonite. I used to say that I employ the Field of Dreams marketing strategy called “If you build it, they will come.” Then I learned that the dialogue in the movie is actually “He will come,” and so I don’t make that same questionably funny joke any longer.

Here are links to some of my favorites:

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 don’t recall how long it took to get my first sale years ago, but I do know it took me months to start getting orders for POD products. There is so much competition that it’s hard to make new products stand out.

Unfortunately, I don’t do any marketing and am not on social media. If there is anti-social media, sign me up.

What I can tell you is to be patient and to take all reasonable steps you can. For example, make sure your images are good, check your listing verbiage and other listing data, do some amount of checking on Etsy for similar products, offer discounts, respond to customers promptly, etc.

I often think of life in terms of Necessary and Sufficient conditions. Thank you, math class. The list of steps above is necessary to succeed. But it may not be Sufficient – You might still not get sales right away. So, I repeat, be patient but take the required steps.

Managing Amuzigu

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?

At the moment, I am the President, CEO, janitor, and chief dog walker of my shop. Mostly dog walker. My setup is pretty basic. Here are some tools I use:

I use Vela to do batch updates in my Etsy shop. Though Etsy can now do some of this, Vela is a very effective tool and well worth its small cost. There is no comparable tool.

For shipping, I use Etsy to generate labels. I used Stamps.Com previously but their Windows software is flaky, and why bother paying the extra $20 a month?

For design, I use Kittl, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, and some others I’m not thinking of at the moment. I’ve found Kittle to be a pleasant surprise. It’s very helpful for manipulating image color palettes and converting from bitmap to vector formats.

For POD, I use Printify and Printful, which I believe have merged or will do so shortly.