Etsy Seller Interview with Chris of CoachHouseForge

How CoachHouseForge 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?

Coach House Forge sells hand-crafted metal homeware, from bowls and bookmarks to candlesticks, fire pokers, and statement art. Everything is hand-made onsite in our family-run forge in Cheshire, UK. The majority of what we sell is hand-stamped with personal messages to commemorate everything from wedding anniversaries to graduations to corporate gifts to lost loves. It all started with a blacksmithing day course, which sparked a passion. Weekends were taken over with blacksmithing—making and experimenting with iron and steel in an old coach house at the bottom of the garden. Which was also the inspiration for the name "Coach House Forge.

It soon became obvious that we had too many fire pokers for one household! So we started selling items on a few different well-known e-commerce platforms, but it became apparent that Etsy was the best fit for our handmade products. After a few years of working around a full-time job, Chris took the leap and became a full-time blacksmith. This provided the time to develop his skills, and he progressed from using fire pokers to specializing in metal bowls with hand-stamped personal messages. New product inspiration comes in many forms; it could be casual conversations with friends or hours spent searching the internet for ideas. Following the ceramic industry is really interesting, but making ceramic forms out of metal can cause some headaches.

Favorite items

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

We’ve developed and designed so many products since we first opened in 2015 that it’s hard to pick favorites! The humble bar keyring, while simple and one of the smallest items in the shop, has such a reassuring weight and is so tactile. We can stamp personalized messages on each of the four sides. Making it the ‘go-to gift’ for everyone!

The smooth trinket bowl (available in various sizes) was introduced in the lockdown of 2020. This bowl is formed using the oldest member of the forge—a Victorian Fly Press! We now have four more Victorian Fly Presses; they’re efficient, not requiring any electricity, just a bit of brute force and hot metal to make a pressed and smooth-finished bowl.

The Square Dish made a comeback to our shop recently. We've been selling its larger counterpart for a while now, and after receiving a few requests for a smaller version, we decided to reintroduce it, and the listing is already gaining traction.

We've been working with copper for a number of years, using it as embellishments on our iron and steel bowls. Copper has added a much-needed hit of color to the forge, so when a listing for copper bowls was created, it took off, and since then we’ve added keyrings and bookmarks too.

We Brits are obsessed with the weather and our gardens, so introducing a robin to the shop has been great fun, and so many of them are flying out of the packing room. They’re made on the plasma cutter, which is a very different design process with great results!

There’s enormous satisfaction in designing something a little different, and we’ve experimented with shapes and styles of bowls over the years, and it's such a great feeling when customers love something we’ve created. The copper "button bowl" has been a consistent seller in the shop, and now we have aluminum and brass elements as the buttons. I'm excited to see how they are received too!

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?

Coach House Forge opened in March 2015, and it took 21 days to make a sale. The feeling of getting that first order felt amazing, and then, of course, it went quiet again for a bit. But, by the end of that first year, we were getting regular orders coming in, and soon I had to start thinking about what changes. Working on SEO has had the biggest impact on attracting customers to our shop, but it does feel like a never-ending task updating listings. We also learn from other shop owners in online forums. This is an invaluable way to learn how the big Etsy machine works! But it’s wise to do your own research on any advice given. Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook are the obvious places to promote our latest products, and we find this a great way for people to find us and learn more about what we do. We view them as talking business cards.

Managing CoachHouseForge

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?

In the beginning, it was a one-man operation: taking orders, working on the Etsy shop, messaging customers, and finding the best shipping deals. It got out of control pretty fast, so we became a full-time husband and wife team, and now we employ a full-time business manager and two part-time blacksmiths.

The forge is where everything is handmade, and we have an office off-site where Amy and Jojo do all the packing, shipping, and running of the business. Customer service is shared between the forge and the office.

We use Whatsapp to manage different streams of work and provide an efficient way to communicate between the office and the forge. As you can imagine, it is loud in the forge, so telephone calls are not appropriate!

The Etsy Seller app is good for getting an overview of what is going on but order management, listing updates, and customer service is done through the Etsy web.

Make (formerly Intergromat) is used to produce daily reports, which are used to pack all our orders. We use this to group orders depending on the shipping profile and if the order is personalized or from our ready-to-ship range.

Xero is used for all our accounting.

Snapseed and Splice are great apps for photo and video editing.

Canva is our go-to for creating marketing materials.

We use Royal Mail and Parcelforce for shipping. The Royal Mail Click and Drop system is integrated with Etsy, so all the information is there for printing labels. Parcelforce is a little more manual in generating all the paperwork. Both companies will collect our parcels from the office in the afternoon, giving us the morning to pack and label them.

The future of CoachHouseForge 

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

Knowing who our customer base is and why they buy from us has been the lynchpin in the success of our business. We will work with this knowledge and develop more products. It would be great to design more pieces for the garden. New areas we would like to branch into are wholesale and corporate gifting.

Advice for new sellers

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

Our advice for anyone starting out with their own Etsy shop is that creating products is a very small part of the business; we soon found out that maintaining listings, figuring out shipping options, accounts, purchasing, customer service - answering queries, sorting shipping delays, the list is endless! This will take up the majority of your time.

Being organized is so important! On Etsy, you can label your messages and get those template messages done ASAP! Have procedures for any complicated processes; it's easy to waste your time working the way you did last month!

Get on the forums and see what main issues people have with running their shops. You can learn so much here, but do be aware of false information and make sure you follow all of Etsy's rules and policies. Read the seller's handbook multiple times!!!

Don’t be afraid to speak the truth if you can’t ship on time, have made a mistake, or something is out of your control. Leaving customers hanging for a response is by far the worst thing you can do.

The other thing is that running a business on your own is very hard, and if you get more than you can handle, think about outsourcing as much of the business as you can—finances, shipping, photography—until you can take someone on a regular contract. Think how big you want the business to be! If you want to stay small, that’s fine too, but most of all, try to keep the original excitement of what you make at the top of your priorities!

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

Question: How much is your monthly revenue?
Answer: seasonal

Question: What is your shop’s conversion rate?
Answer: (For 2022) 5.1 (all time) 5.7