Etsy Seller Interview with Angela and Nicholas of Nickangula

How Nickangula 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?

Our shop is named Nickangula; it is a nickname our friend gave Nick and me when we started dating back in high school. We are both creative and enjoy making things, so I started this shop as a place we could sell the random things we came up with to make. Our major focuses in the shop are geek-inspired, photography-inspired, and offbeat fashion, accessories, and décor, but we also added custom puppets to our services.

I opened the shop in 2015 but didn’t end up putting anything in it until fall 2017. I got sick near the end of 2016, with symptoms that got rapidly worse, so I had to go out of work from my retail job around March 2017. I was having daily debilitating migraines, vertigo, brain fog, back and neck pain or stiffness, and a slew of other crazy symptoms. I would barely make it through a couple hours of work, and it would make me so sick that I would be in bed for the next 3-5 days. Too much sensory stimulation seemed to set off my symptoms, especially visual ones.

I went about 9 months seeing about a dozen different medical professionals before I finally met with a neurovisual optometrist who diagnosed me with binocular vision dysfunction, a vestibular disorder caused by a misalignment in my eyes and a couple of traumatic brain injuries I had experienced. I had the most severe case she had ever seen, and in order to improve and regain some sort of control back over my life, I needed to start weekly vision therapy for 6 months to retrain my brain and eyes how to do their jobs without making me super sick.

This therapy was pretty expensive and not covered by my insurance, so I needed a way to come up with money fast. So, I decided to post some of my clothing design work on Etsy, as well as offer handmade bunny ear hats. Nick had made me one as a surprise a year or two earlier, and then I made my own pattern for a slightly different design. People really liked the hats, so we figured it was worth a shot to try to sell them on Etsy. I thought I could work on them when my symptoms weren’t too bad.

We sold our first hat within a few days of posting it—you wouldn’t believe how excited I was! I couldn’t believe I sold something! Then more sales came in, and within a month and a half, we sold 60 hats! ((  had to cut it off at 60 because it was A LOT to get done, and I was still sick all the time and had limits. Nick helped me make hats when he could after work and on the weekends, but I tried to do as much of it as I could.

With the visual therapy, I started to improve and was capable of working for longer periods of time. I learned what my triggers were: loud noises, bright or flashing lights, seeing quick movement, or too many things going on around me at once. Staying home in a controlled environment allowed me to have more time in which I wasn’t incredibly sick or in as much pain. Returning to a "normal" job out in the real world wasn’t really an option, and I was too stubborn to go on disability (even though I definitely should have). So, I kept designing and adding more things to the shop. I went to college for fashion design, and my dream career was to have my own clothing line. I had originally intended the clothing line to have a different name and a different shop, but I put everything under the Nickangula shop to keep things simpler. Then things just took off.

I work with a few online manufacturers based out of Hong Kong—ArtsCow, ArtsAdd, and Yoycol—for the majority of my products. They have online design tools with which I can put my own graphics on hundreds of different products, ranging from clothing, shoes, home décor, car accessories, gift ideas, and so on. I used to be a photographer and like to make graphics and fabric prints from my art photography. Nick used to be an Imperial Stormtrooper with the 501st Legion, so I had a lot of photographs of him and other customers in the organization to make graphics from. These are some of my most popular designs. I also still make the bunny hats; we have made well over 200. We started adding custom look-alike puppets to our repertoire after Nick made a few amazing puppets as gifts for friends. Nick does most of the puppet work, but he is teaching me the ropes. My background in fashion design helped me make and alter the clothing for the puppet's body proportions.

Favorite items

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

Some of my favorite items include our midi bodycon dresses, which are a definite best seller. I just love the cut, and the graphics turn out so crisply printed. These are very popular for Star Wars-inspired weddings, Disney theme park and cruise guests, and comic-con goers.

The bunny hats too; they gave us our start and showed me that I can find success on the Etsy platform! I keep the availability of these somewhat limited because sometimes I just need a break from the sea of fleece, but I know when I need to bump up sales and am not in the middle of another big project, I can sell more of these.

My other best sellers are these great fitness bags which a lot of roller derby people use for skate bags! Before I got sick, I played roller derby for a couple of years, and sadly was not able to go back. I had even purchased myself a brand-new fancy (expensive) pair of roller skates shortly before my derby career ended. But I turned this into a win by making a graphic from an artsy photo of my skates and putting it on these skate bags – now I’ve sold enough bags with this graphic that I paid for these hardly-used fancy skates a few times over! The best part of these bags is I can personalize them for people with their epic derby names!

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?

It only took a few days after listing the bunny ear hats for us to get our first sale. Then the sales just started accumulating! The key to getting people to my shop is having lots of descriptors in my listing titles and using all 13 tags. I try to think of the different ways someone might search for an item like mine and put those words in the title and tags. For example, if I have a pair of high-top shoes, I try to include the words shoes, high-top, hi-top, sneakers, and skater shoes. If something would make a good gift idea for a certain demographic, I might put something like "Roller Derby Gift Idea" in the title or "Roller Derby Gift" as a tag.

I also had a lot of success doing paid Instagram ads. I’d say about 95% of the time I did an ad, I would get at least one sale. And I never paid more than $10 to run an ad; usually I stuck to about $5 for the budget of one ad. The key to getting those ads in front of the right people is really knowing your customer demographic and what kinds of things interest them. You can fine-tune the ads to be shown to people in your target demographic and increase your chances of getting seen by the right people. One interest I selected for every single ad was "online shopping". You are an online retailer; you want to be seen by people who enjoy spending money online!

Managing Nickangula

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 handle most aspects of managing the shop and our social media presence. I even do my own taxes! QuickBooks Self-Employed is a life saver; Etsy connects directly to it, so it transfers all of the transactions over so I don’t have to go through every single micro-transaction. For shipping and fulfillment, my manufacturers handle the drop shipping for orders I place with them, and I use Etsy shipping labels for items I have on hand or make custom. Etsy labels definitely make shipping orders and returns much more convenient, as well as saving me money with their discount. Nick works a full-time job, so his involvement is limited to when he has time to work on projects, but the two of us are really good at brainstorming ideas together. There are so many ideas that I never would have come up with myself.

The future of Nickangula

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

I am actually planning on opening a second shop for custom wedding and special occasion shops, but it will be a part of the "Nickangula universe", so I will promote it through our established shop and social media at least to start. I wanted to do it in a separate shop because these dresses will have a different feel than the essence of the Nickangula brand. Most of my summer will be devoted to designing and making the prototypes for the new shop. The new brand is called "Faceless by Design", and will hopefully launch before the end of the year!

For the Nickangula shop, I am constantly expanding my product lines, trying new products, and creating new graphics. I am getting a lot of return customers, so I want to keep things fresh to keep them coming back for more! I am also increasing the amount of personalized or customizable products I offer, which really seems to draw more traffic to my shop. I love working with customers to make them something really unique and special! So this year, the goal is to make several new graphics to use to expand design options for customers.

Advice for new sellers

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

First off, just do it! Etsy is a massive platform to show the general world what you can do. It is so exciting every time I sell something to a customer in another country. You are not limited to the confines of a brick-and-mortar store; the world is your oyster! With this kind of exposure, chances are there is someone out there who would like what you have to offer. You never know until you try. It only costs 20 cents to post a listing, so why not put your work out there and see what happens? As I write this, I have made 2,276 sales through Etsy and recently passed $100,000 in revenue. Never in a million years did I think enough people were out there to give me money for my designs. As a creative person, it is the best feeling. And the more you sell, the more motivated you get to set goals for yourself and beat them!

Second: Research! Know your demographic, know what they like, and know what keywords and search terms they use. Pay attention to your most popular selling products and figure out why they are selling. Then determine how to expand upon that to create more sales.

Third, be willing to work with people. Etsy customers come to Etsy for something special and unique, and you wouldn’t believe how excited or happy they are when you take a little bit of extra time to answer a question or create something one-of-a-kind just for them. That level of customer satisfaction often leads to rave reviews and returning customers.