Etsy Seller Interview with Alexandre and Magalie of CurlyWoods

How CurlyWoods 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, We are Curly Woods. We began our journey back in November 2017. Back then, we were building furniture and decor items for our friends and relatives, working from our home garage on those beautiful pieces. Slowly, we started to sell some of our creations on Etsy and got totally hooked since then... Curly Woods is now a small family business based in Quebec, Canada. We now own two woodworking shops and employ eight fantastic employees.

We proudly make all of our pieces by hand and in-house from carefully selected sustainable materials, and all of our creations are made to last a lifetime. Each idea for a potential Curly Woods product is thoughtfully vetted through countless hours of research, design, and crafting. The finished products we offer are the result of many iterations and fine-tuning to ensure perfect usability and style. The quality of our products is in the details: the intentional contrast between wood grains and concrete is our signature.

Curly Woods's mission is to create products that will perfectly fit our customers' expectations and needs; therefore, all of our productions can be customized to fit their unique desires. We believe that the spaces we inhabit affect our moods, thoughts, and actions. As such, we aim to make products that look stunning and will bring joy to our customers' everyday lives.

Favorite items

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

If we have to choose a "favorite" item from our creations, I would definitely go with our concrete bedside tables. Those are so unique and versatile. Those tables are really good sellers as is, although they are also often customized to fit our customers' desires, resulting in new, unique, and awesome versions of those designs.

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?

After only 2 days on Etsy, our small shop, which featured only a handful of items back then, made its first sale. We were so excited and impressed to see how easy it was to sell and communicate with customers on Etsy. Today, with over 80 products offered on our Etsy shop, we mostly attract new customers by using the great Etsy marketing services and publicizing our creations over the different social media platforms,

Managing CurlyWoods

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?

As the business is rapidly growing, Curly Woods has now become a large family. We have a team of eight employees working on the realization of our different projects. Magalie's main responsibilities are to manage Etsy communications, shipping, and order fulfillment. A key point of our success is the flawless communication between us and our current and future customers. Keeping our customers informed of the status of their orders and discussing custom projects with prospects are really the milestones of our success.

The future of CurlyWoods

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

Business-to-business sales will be the next challenge we look forward to tackling. Keeping our current business model is a must, as we simply love creating custom pieces for our customers, but our new B2B department will allow us to grow in a totally new and exciting way, taking Curly Woods from a small family business to a larger player in the furniture industry.

Advice for new sellers

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

Here are my top three pieces of advice for new Etsy shop owners.

1. Communication with your customers is gold. Etsy customers are looking for a personalized experience, so make sure they feel that personal vibe. Don’t hesitate to follow up with customers who contacted you but didn’t buy yet.

2: Use your downtime to expand your line of products. Creating and featuring new pieces will attract new customers to your shop; new customers who will shop around your other creations will share what they like with their relatives, therefore attracting new visitors to your shop.

3: Offer customizations. Customers on Etsy are looking for unique pieces they can’t find in "regular" stores. Offering to customize your creations to fit their unique needs will open an all-new market, and you’ll get a lot more recurrent customers this way, as customers who are looking for personalized items are more likely to come back to you over the years to complete their collection and get matching items.

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

Question: How much is your monthly revenue?
Answer: 40K to 50K a month… total of 1.7M so far.

Question: What is your average profit margin?
Answer: 20% to 30%

Question: What is your shop’s conversion rate?
Answer: 0.4%