Etsy Seller Interview with Sarah of StickerKittenDesign

How StickerKittenDesign 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 there! I’m Sarah, and my shop is StickerKittenDesign. I began selling on Etsy in 2016 with my range of papercraft products, including packs of patterned papers and cute stamp sets. All the artwork is designed by me and my husband, James, and our products are all made in the UK. Our first range was called Birthday Dinos and included cute designs of James’s hand-drawn dinosaurs. I am a keen crafter and saw a gap in the market for fun, cute, and contemporary papercraft supplies for cardmakers and scrapbookers—something different from the bears and flowers that were out there at the time! Our next few ranges included cute penguins, bees, mermaids, unicorns, and most recently, jungle and palm house themes. We love bright colours and beautiful-quality paper so that crafters can make gorgeous cards and projects. As well as stamps and paper packs, we quickly branched out into selling stickers and ephemera (card toppers), which we make ourselves. Ever since I was little, I have loved stickers. I would collect hundreds of them, and I dreamed one day of owning a sticker factory and a sticker shop. My Etsy store is like a little dream come true! It gives me so much joy to send out stickers and papercraft supplies to our customers. We also sell cute earrings featuring our designs, which are popular at the Christmas fairs we do each year too.

Favorite items

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

One of my favourite items is our cute kitten sticker. One year at a Christmas fair, a customer saw the name of our business and jokingly asked if we made kitten stickers. At the time, we didn’t! But it certainly made sense. They are now one of our bestselling items. I also love our card kits. They’re perfect for beginners, and sales really took off during lockdown when people were stuck indoors and started to take up new hobbies. Our Bee Garden card kit is a great one to start with, as it makes it really easy for you to create four beautiful cards for birthdays or every day. And though it hasn’t sold a lot, another favourite of mine is our Palm House paper pack. A lot of love and joy went into designing it, and it came out just as I pictured, with dreamy, peaceful colours and a tropical vibe.

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?

Back in 2016, it actually took months before we saw a single sale. At first, we sold items only to family and friends, and when we got our first ‘real’ customer, we were so excited! Sales were few and far between for a long time—pretty irregular for a few years, in fact. But our shop grew slowly and steadily, and now we receive orders daily. I could only have dreamed of that back then! One of the great things about Etsy is that we don’t really need to do any advertising or marketing ourselves. We have our own website, stickerkitten.co.uk, and a great little craft community on Facebook, Instagram, and our email list, but for the most part, customers find us through searching on Etsy.

Managing StickerKittenDesign

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?

It’s just me and my husband managing our shop. We have paper packs, stamps, and stencils in stock all the time, but stickers, ephemera, and earrings are made to order. Usually, once the kids are in bed, we come up to our home office and print and pack orders. We always use Etsy’s built-in Royal Mail shipping labels, as it makes it very quick and easy to send out orders, especially overseas, as all the customs requirements are dealt with by Etsy.

The future of StickerKittenDesign

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

I would love to grow our shop further and create more sticker designs and sets of planner stickers. I’m also working on improving my own artwork skills so I can create more of the patterns for our paper packs, as currently James does a lot of the artwork based on my sketches. We have a 3D printer, which we use to make earrings and mini stencils, and we’re also working on some new planner charms and keyrings. I’d love to invest in a laser cutter again (we had one a few years ago before it became too expensive to maintain) so we can make embellishments again. And I’d love to branch out into homeware products with our designs on them, such as mugs and tea towels. I would love to make a living from StickerKitten one day. We’re not there yet, but we’re moving forward a little at a time.

Advice for new sellers

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

I would say enjoy! It’s very exciting to open your own shop, though it can be nerve-racking too. There’s a lot to get right, such as pricing, good product photography, and keywords. There are a lot of great tutorials out there on how to launch a shop effectively, price products, etc., and a lot of it is trial and error over time. You can make use of Etsy’s built-in analytics to see what is selling well and not so well and what search terms buyers are using to find your items. And Etsy also releases seasonal trend reports, so you can make use of those when thinking about new products for your store. I also make use of coupon codes and sales every so often with Etsy’s built-in marketing tools. It really takes only a few clicks to set these up, and then Etsy takes care of that aspect of marketing and advertising on your behalf.