Etsy Seller Interview with Thomas of Thoroger

How Thoroger 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, I’m Thomas Feichtinger, creator and owner of the Etsy shop Thoroger. I started selling on Etsy in 2023, my main focus was to find digital products that have a demand and are products I like and enjoy making. My shop is more like a shop of all trades, a creative outlet for me and my interests and ideas. That’s not the perfect niching-down philosophy, I know, but I’m a passionate D&D and fantasy-loving, AI graphic and 3D printing nerd with a degree in mechanical engineering ;-). I primarily decide what to sell by analyzing the market, filtering my interests in 3D printing designs, RPG adventures items I like to make, and so on. I then focus on the products that have a demand and I am trying to improve these products further, add new twists to them, tell exciting stories and add quirky NPCs in case of the D&D adventures, or add new features to 3D print models for cookie makers or other improvements in general.
For creating my products I use several tools I’m familiar with. For my 3D models, I use Fusion 360 because I use it also in my job as an engineer. For my RPG adventure scripts, I use an online tool to help me with the formatting and elements needed to have a good adventure description for game masters. When I have the product ready I focus nearly half of the complete listing production time making good screenshots, optimizing the title and descriptions, and finding the perfect tags for the products. 

Favorite items

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

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One of my favorite items, which is also selling in my shop, would be the latest 5e adventure I uploaded. I also ran this adventure with my kids and their friends and they loved it. It makes me happy if something I am making brings purpose and fun to someone else.

The Dimensional Spoon

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The Dimensional Spoon

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For 3D printing, I think my most liked design (and customers who buy it) would be the 

Adjustable Heat Sealer Table.

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This was one of the products I did some analysis on before I designed it. I saw that there were already some heat sealer tables on the market then, but they did not offer to adjust the height manually by a screw mechanism. With this improvement, the customer can adjust the height of the table to his or her liking. Meanwhile, there are some copycats of my initial design on the market, but I am proud to be the first (as I know it) to come up with this idea.

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One of my best sellers is this listing for cookie makers. I even made a finite element calculation for this design to come up with the best and strongest design for the tip of this cookie scraper.

Cookie Scraper and Holder, 6 Different Cookie Scraper Sizes, Cookie Tool STL files, 3D Print Baking Tool, Cookie Scribe Holder 

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My personal favorite (but not in case of selling) is the Minimalist Watering Can. I wanted to design a kind of minimalist style to it, inspired by some famous industrial designers.

Minimalist STL Watering Can - 3D Print File for Home Decor & Gardening, Digital Download, DIY Gift, Designer Watering Can

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 think the first sales came quickly, I think the first sale I had in 2 weeks. As always (I have now 2 Etsy shops online) it takes time to even get shown on the market, but when the algorithm kicks in you make the first sales, you have to make good listing images and good SEO of course. Currently, I rely on organic traffic on Etsy a lot, and I run Etsy ads for $2 to $5 a day.

I’m not a social media guy although I think I should do it to promote my shop. My problem is that I don’t like Instagram or Facebook very much, that's the reason I set up an AI bot on make.com using Open AI API to do this for me for my second shop on Etsy. The most traffic I get from it is from Pinterest. Instagram and Facebook are a waste of your time I think, at least the way I do it.

Managing Thoroger

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 manage my shops myself, I use AI to help me with the descriptions and titles and finding some Ideas. 

Here are the other tools I use:

Fusion 360: I think the best CAD program right now is for 3D modeling for 3D prints. 

My Creality Ender 3 printer to test my designs.

Alura.io for the initial phase to find already selling listings and come up with new ideas to sell.

Adobe Creative Cloud: Expensive, but lots of tools included.

Midjourney: I think the best text-to-image AI generator.

make.com: I use it for social media marketing on autopilot.

The future of Thoroger

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

I hope to grow them even further. The shops I run are a creative outlet for me and help me buy tools and hardware I need for doing my hobbies. For the future I’m hoping to make a living out of them some day, perhaps to even quit my day job and focus primarily on my passionate projects.

Advice for new sellers

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

Don’t get frustrated. It’s hard if you make your best product, invest a lot of time in making it, shoot the photos, come up with descriptions, and see only 2 to 3 views a week, or not even that. If you start a new shop it is the hardest time, in this phase just focus on getting as many products online as possible, and don’t get frustrated by watching the so-called “Gurus” on YouTube bragging about 10,000 dollars in one week, they have no clue what they are saying the most of the time and just want youtube clicks out of you. The key is consistency and patience. Rome wasn’t built in a day. That's true for every Etsy shop out there. If you keep doing it, concentrate on good SEO and as perfect as possible listing images, because they matter the most,  the sales will eventually kick in, and when they do you will be happy. 

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

Question: How much is your monthly revenue?
Answer: Thoroger.etsy.com about $360 StitchedShadows.etsy.com $ 510

Question: What is your average profit margin?
Answer: These are digital shops, so it must be about 70 to 80%

Question: What is your shop’s conversion rate?
Answer: About 4 to 5% for both shops.