How CreatorsImageStudio 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?
My name is Katja, I’m Dutch, and I founded an Etsy shop called Creator’s Image Studio. My shop offers downloadable tutorials to create beautiful albums or other gift items. Think photo albums (from XL to micro), folios, boxes, cards, photo wallets, and anything else I can come up with. Each tutorial is intended for paper crafters who would like to craft beautiful projects and who are looking for some inspiration. They are written in English and are suitable for both beginners and experienced crafters.
I played with the idea of opening an Etsy shop somewhere in 2014, at age 43. I had already created several paper art projects, and I wondered whether I could translate my designs into workable tutorials. They would have to be detailed, step-by-step instructions with lots of clear pictures. Each tutorial would have to be a kind of illustrated ebook. I had no idea if I could manage this, so my plan, such as it was, was to first create one or two tutorials and then try to upload them to Etsy. By the end of January 2015, after uploading my first draft of a shop banner and my first tutorial just to get a feel for the technical side of things, I accidentally pressed the Open Shop button. OMG, I had somehow opened an actual Etsy shop! And the rest is history.
I gradually filled up my shop, and I also decided on a weekly upload schedule for my Youtube channel, called imageofthecreator, to hopefully build an audience. By now, I have sold over 1300 tutorials, and my channel has over 15K followers. I also started a blog, Creator’s Image Studio. In the grand scheme of things, we’re talking small numbers, but still, I’m quite happy with how the shop is doing, especially since I have always had (and still have) a full-time office job and have to manage all this papercraft work on the side. That is why I count all my sales as successes and am very grateful for the many 5-star reviews.
Papercrafting is and will remain my hobby, as will my shop and my YouTube channel. My channel isn’t monetized, and my shop is only a modest extra income stream, but I do love sharing what I know, and I really enjoy being able to bring some creative inspiration through my work.
Favorite items
What are your favorite items? What makes these so special? Why do you think these items might be selling well?
I love all my designs because they came straight from my heart. But if I had to pick some absolute favorites, they would be designs that I feel are extra special to me as a creator, either in the originality of the design or in the techniques used or both. Designs I’m particularly proud of, regardless of whether they sell well or not. A prime example of such a design is my Never Ending Memories Folio Album, tutorial #3 in my Etsy shop.
This has also been the best-selling design in my shop for the past couple of years. It’s basically a cross between a folio and a photo album. It has many interactive elements and a lot of room for pictures. You open it by rolling it—and rolling it and rolling it, unfolding its mysteries with each roll—almost like it’s a never-ending album. I have two Youtube videos showing it, the second one is a reprisal of the folio album actually filled up with pictures. I don’t know exactly why this design has been so successful, but I’m guessing one of the reasons is the originality of the design, in combination with the relative ease of creating one yourself. I also think maybe my choice of paper patterns and colors helped; perhaps it simply spoke to many people.
A second favorite is my so-called Double-Stacked Mini Album, the theme of which is Celebrate Every Day. You can watch me showing the finished album on Youtube, and if you’d like to create one yourself, you can find its design in my shop as Tutorial #13. This is quite a large photo album with two sets of interactive pages attached to the hinge, one above the other. This allows you to peruse multiple pages at once in different combinations.
It is the #2 all-time best-seller of my shop, and I love this design because even while I was designing the album, I felt I brought something new to the table, at least as far as I was aware. I also fell in love with the particular color scheme I used. I have a deep, inexplicably ardent love of colors and color combinations; colors are oxygen for my soul. For me personally, the whole album just worked. Several people have asked to purchase the actual album in the past couple of years, but I cannot bring myself to part with it. My tutorial makes it possible for people to create one themselves. Another favorite of mine is my micro-album design, titled Fresh & Bright. It measures only 338 x 334 inches (8.5 x 9.5 cm) and has been quite popular in my shop for a while, maintaining a steady presence in the Top Five best-selling list.
I designed several other micro albums, some even smaller than this one, but the Fresh & Bright design is elegantly simple and relatively quick and easy to make. It was my first micro album design, so it has a special place in my heart. I’m very pleased that several people liked this design so much that they commissioned me to make customized physical versions for them, mostly for baby showers. These cute little micro albums do indeed make perfect baby shower gifts, especially when decorated with baby-themed design papers and embellishments. I have several examples of this design on Youtube
For customers who prefer video learning to a PDF file, I recorded an actual video course for this micro album design. You can find it as Tutorial #18b in my shop, with #18a being the PDF-only version. People can watch this English-language video tutorial on their own time and as often as they like. I’m very proud of this video course; it took a lot of work to record and edit it, and I’m convinced that it is very helpful to video learners. I have a second video course, by the way: Tutorial #46 is one of my larger photo album designs.
Speaking of super small albums, I would also like to mention my Gatefold Micro Album in a Box design. It is absolutely tiny, even smaller than the other micro album mentioned above, and the cuteness factor is very high with this one!
When you remove the lid, the sides of the box fall open. I’m sharing detailed instructions for both the micro album and the box that will hold it in Tutorial #48. I cannot fathom why it’s not a best-seller, since it is one of my personal favorites. I like its super-small size in combination with its many details. I also like hidden elements in projects; it’s always a fun surprise for people when they open that lovely little box to find an even cuter, fully functional little album inside. And finally, I’d love to give a quick special mention to my three easiest tutorials: #6, #9 and #12. They are all smaller projects and could be an ideal way to try your hand at paper crafting even if you don’t have any experience yet.
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 know exactly when I got my first order, since my Etsy stats don’t offer any such details before 2017. What I can see, however, is that I earned 212 sales in my first year (2015), and I remember how awesome that was. I think most of my traffic comes from Etsy itself, either the app or the website. So I used to make it a point to add new tutorials regularly, at least 6–8 times a year. I haven’t reached that specific target since 2020, however, because I simply haven’t been able to design a lot of projects during those years. It was harder to ‘reach a creative place’ in my heart, head, and hands. I haven’t given up on my shop, though. I may not have reached my exact uploading target for a while, but I did keep adding some new designs to my shop. And I do plan to keep that up.
Managing CreatorsImageStudio
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 am a one-woman show and completely self-taught as far as my paper crafting and my shop are concerned. I run my shop as a hobby, so I don’t have any professional tools available. I use a free online tool to compress the PDF files, for Etsy only allows 20 MB as a maximum file size (which, frankly, is ridiculous in this day and age, where files of all types get bigger and bigger, yet Etsy sticks to its 20 MB max for downloadables).
Once the files are uploaded, I don’t have to do anything myself to fulfill orders. That’s a great feature Etsy brings; it’s truly an easy platform to offer downloadable digital products. Customers make a purchase and can then immediately download their files. Perfect and immediate order fulfillment! Etsy allows up to 5 digital files per listing, which gives me the option to break up very large files into separate parts. It also makes it possible to offer something extra now and then, like a bonus cutting guide for some design variation or another, a printable decorative element, or a template I designed to go along with an album—that kind of thing.
Every once in a while I offer physical mini albums in my shop, but since most of my customer base is international (to me), shipping costs are steep, and I’ve concluded that physical albums are therefore very hard to sell for someone in the Netherlands. People simply don’t seem to be willing to pay the high prices that come with international shipping.
On a side note, I find all those shipping variations within the Etsy platform quite mind-boggling. I’ve tried a couple of times and given up on it, especially since Etsy’s demands on that front keep getting tougher and tougher as well. All in all, I hardly offer anything physical in my shop, and when I do, it’s aimed mostly at the Dutch market.
The future of CreatorsImageStudio
What goals do you have for your shop in the future?
Since it’s a hobby, I don’t have a business plan or any hard growth targets. However, I do have some ambitions to improve my shop in the future. For instance, I’d like to add short videos to every listing. I’d also like to review each and every one of my existing tutorials and refresh their designs by adding new techniques I’ve learned. I also want to add some fresh pictures to the tutorials. This would of course mean I’d have to actually recreate (and improve) every design I’ve ever made. I’m not quite ready to go there yet, but I’ve recently done it with one tutorial as kind of a try-out for the idea, and I was happy with the result.
On a smaller scale, I would like to offer more seasonal items and offer things more seasonally. So, instead of listing every tutorial in my shop every single day, I’d like to cull the offerings a bit and bring them down to targeted seasonal offerings, which would come and go with each season and/or holiday. I would also like to change up my banner and logo along with those seasons. It’s fun to think about these things, and knowing myself, I will find a way to manage my limited time and get around to them.
Advice for new sellers
What’s your advice for a new seller starting an Etsy shop?
Well, I obviously cannot tell you how to become the owner of a super successful online store from which you can earn a living. So let me highlight the other side of things and offer some encouragement. We all hear and read about these success stories—people who have opened a shop and managed to make it successful. That is laudable and something to aspire to. Meanwhile, not every single Etsy seller is successful, and not every seller is successful quickly. I don’t have the numbers, but my guess would be that it’s even a majority of sellers who remain small and hardly earn any revenue ever.
So, if you’re a new seller, you’ll need something to motivate you through those dry spells. That is why discipline and hard work aren’t enough; you need a vision for your shop, even if it’s only a hobby for you because hobby shops also take a lot of time and effort to generate some sales.
So, what is your shop’s purpose? What goals do you want to achieve with it? If you can, add a spiritual dimension to those goals as well. In what manner do you want it to bring joy to your customers? In what way could your shop help you improve yourself, your character, and your skill set? Write those things down. Be specific. Once you have a vision that can carry you through the hard times, remind yourself of it on a regular basis: Here’s why I’m going through all this trouble.
Perhaps your shop’s name can reflect that vision. For instance, I named my shop Creator’s Image Studio because I carry within me the deep conviction that every person has at least some creativity inside him or herself. This conviction stems from my belief that we are all created in the image of God—we are all images of the Creator—and that, as a result of that, we’re also meant to be, or invited to be, "creators" ourselves. How cool is that? And I would love for my shop to be a means of helping that invitation reach my potential customers.
CreatorsImageStudio
Creator's Image Studio
