How BeckasInsects 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?
Hi, I am Becka Gauld. I have been making my wire, glass, driftwood, sheet copper, and gemstone spiders, insects, cobwebs, cats, bats, fairies, and mollusks for over twenty-five years. Joining Etsy was revolutionary for my business. Before this, I had a website that I struggled to maintain myself and got almost no traffic. I did lots of craft shows and supplied shops, but before I joined Etsy, all the digital foot traffic I got was derived from cards I handed out at craft shows. These days, my Etsy sales have kept me almost too busy to return to in-person fairs!
I have always made things; I had my first craft fair at primary school, selling beano-related polymer clay items and ceramic swans and frogs. As a teenager, I started supplying shops with dollhouse food I made. When I was 17, I used my dad’s soldering iron and wire to recreate a spider brooch I had lost. When I moved to Edinburgh to do my Ecology degree, I was still making dollhouse food, and I got frustrated with how little I could charge for these items. I decided to make some more of the wire spiders and see how they went on a street stall in the Edinburgh Fringe. They sold faster than I could make them! When I finished my degree, I split my time between craft shows and gardening. These two careers suited each other perfectly, with peak work at different times of the year and a suitable balance of rest and exercise, and I could make stock any day that the weather was too bad for gardening.
As the years went by, the species I made expanded, and the quality of my workmanship improved. I continued doing shows, and I supplied a few shops. I love the feedback I get from people at in-person events, and so many of my new designs have come from customer requests and suggestions. My basic techniques haven't changed since I first started, but over the years, I've refined and honed my skills. I have always found my own way of doing things and never had a lesson in what I do. From time to time, I have branched out entirely—one very cold week in York, on a stall in the Christmas market, I visualized and later made the flower fairies that are now a big feature of my summer stalls. My now-extensive cat collection began with a design created as a cake topper for my cousin's wedding. When my old website needed a major makeover in 2016, I decided to abandon it and join Etsy. I couldn’t believe the difference it made. Once I had gotten the hang of how to use the tags effectively, I was amazed at the volume of traffic coming my way.
Favorite items
What are your favorite items? What makes these so special? Why do you think these items might be selling well?
My favorite item? This is a hard question. I enjoy making leafcutter ant sculptures. I make a whole bundle of the three sizes of ants, then the customer chooses the driftwood, and I have fun colonizing it with the ants in a way that I feel looks most natural. Excitingly, Marvel contacted me last year to request permission to use one as set dressing in the new Ant-Man film Quantemania, so I am eagerly awaiting its release on February 17th to see if they used it anywhere!
I also really enjoy making cobwebs. as each one is different and made in response to the shape of the wood. I have fun imagining how it would turn out if a real spider was constructing it, and I try to take my lead from that. There is also the added bonus of having to take nice walks on the beach to gather driftwood. I need to make and individually list some more of these once the post-Christmas restocking of shops has died down, as I only have made-to-order options up right now.
My favorite private commission last year was when someone turned up with an incredibly large piece of bog wood and asked me to create a web, lapis lazuli spiders, and a whole buzzing nest of ants to populate it.
My many various "bugs in a box" are always popular at just £9.50. I am always adding species to this range, which keeps things interesting for me, and these are sometimes the forerunners to a larger version of the same species. My kids enjoy helping me make comfortable boxes of moss, lichen, twigs, and seeds for them to reside in.
I’ve also been getting a lot of enjoyment from my Monay spider orders. It’s been lovely to hear everyone’s stories as to why they want a particular coin used as a gift, and it’s a great excuse to frequent my local philately and numismatic shop to get coins from specific years and countries.
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 opened my Etsy shop in 2011, but I didn’t actually start using it until December 2016, when I got six sales! The next year, I got 48, but as I continued to add designs and hand out business cards, sales rose to 107 in 2018 and 222 in 2019. In October 2020, with the pandemic not going away any time soon, I realized I needed to figure out how to use it properly and finally read some of the Etsy handbooks. It was like flipping a switch. Within a week of improving all the tags, my sales leaped up. I also started using my Facebook business page more regularly and joined a few Facebook selling groups, one of which gave me access to some great workshops on how to use Facebook for a business. I also did some excellent free online workshops with Business Gateway.
I tried to get on board with Instagram too, but I still struggle with finding the time to use more than one platform effectively. I continue to be surprised at a small, steady flow of traffic from Pinterest, though just from other people tagging photos on my website. In 2020, I achieved 463 sales, and 721 in 2021 as I continued to build on my Facebook presence by joining lots more selling groups, reading Etsy’s seasonal emails about trends, and adjusting my tags accordingly. The next step is figuring out how to maintain these sales while also finding enough time to go back to some face-to-face sales, as I miss them.
Managing BeckasInsects
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 make almost all the items in my shop myself. (I also stock a couple of items from some talented dragon-maker friends of mine.) This means that there are only so many hours in the day, which limits my output. I need to make every item, package it up, and post it; make regular, engaging Facebook posts; keep re-evaluating the Etsy tags to keep them current; and come up with, photograph, and add new designs to my Etsy shop. All this while still being a mom, wife, and friend with duties and a social life!
I sometimes ponder what, if anything, I could outsource to someone else. I have 25 years of experience making the designs, so it’s not practical to train someone else to do this bit. Each order is so specific in terms of species and color that it would only be worth getting someone else to package them up when I am super busy, like in the run-up to Christmas, and most everything else needs the personal touch—Facebook posts need my personality stamped on them. I have been considering supplying my friend's teenager with a bunch of photos and asking them to run an Instagram account for me! They may even be able to tweak the tags for me too. I sometimes pay my kids to put moss into boxes, cut up delivery slips, and pre-stuff envelopes with these and business cards, which they enjoy getting a little money for.
Two years ago I switched to getting all my labels through Etsy, which, while it lost the lovely handwritten personal touch, greatly sped up my process, eliminated the danger of copying an address wrong, and saved me money on parcels. Last year I finally invested in a proper label printer, which has massively streamlined the parceling process that previously involved cutting up paper printouts and securing them with tape. I use all the sticker backs as packing materials, so nothing is wasted.
The future of BeckasInsects
What goals do you have for your shop in the future?
I am at a tipping point right now. I have pretty much maxed out on the time I currently have available to give to my business while still fitting in on family holidays, school pick-ups, and band practice! While I could pay for my kids to have after-school child care, at this point, if we can afford not to, I’d rather see them before they become grumpy teenagers and don’t want to hang out! When this happens, I can expand more and maybe train them up to contribute more to the business. I would like to get back to doing a few more large face-to-face shows this year, so it means being more focused in the quieter months on building up background stock levels to take to shows later in the year. In particular, I miss my stall on the High Street in the Edinburgh Fringe throughout August, and if my ants do appear in the next Ant-Man film, I should definitely try and get along to a Comicon or two!
Advice for new sellers
What’s your advice for a new seller starting an Etsy shop?
The first piece of advice I always give is to read the Etsy handbook. The top priority is "The Ultimate Guide to Produce Photography" and "The Ultimate Guide to Etsy Search." There are lots more to read after that about how to be optimized in searches, get good conversion rates, understand seasonal trends, and so on.
Great photos are key to stopping people from scrolling and getting them clicking on Etsy, Facebook, and Instagram, and getting tagged on Pinterest too. With a bit of advice from the handbook, anyone can produce excellent-quality photographs at home. The cameras and free editing tools that come with every device now are all so good. It’s all down to clear shots with natural lighting and the right choice of background and cropping.
Social media is a must. Sharing all my Facebook posts across a range of selling sites has been a game-changer for me. I have learned so much about how your own interactions with other people are vital to boosting how much your post gets shown to other people. It’s all about the algorithms. I would definitely recommend a free online workshop or two with Business Gateway to get you started. Each workshop is only a couple of hours long, and they are well worth the investment of time. Choose one platform to start with and go from there.
Thirdly, don't be intimidated by keeping your own accounts. Until you are earning big money, it is a lot easier than you think. Just keep all your paper receipts, put all your digital receipts in a folder, and sign up for a free workshop with Business Gateway to give you some pointers.
Some sellers really get inspired by hearing numbers. Feel free to share these if you like.
Question: How much is your monthly revenue?
Answer: Approximately 1K per month, with up to 2.5K in November and December. All the bulk orders I make for shops and shows are in addition to this.
Question: What is your average profit margin?
Answer: I find Etsy fees work out to about 17% a month, and postage is about 15%. Materials are probably 10% of the total, so the rest is for my time.
Question: What is your shop’s conversion rate?
Answer: Ironically, my conversion rate was better at 3% when sales were low. These days it’s 1.3%, so I should probably address that!
