How to Break In

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Everyone wants to be a professional crafter, right? Unfortunately, most crafts do not profit enough money to quit your day job. Although it can be a profitable side business if you work it right. Now I am just in the beginning stages of this process so I am learning right along with you all.

I started crafting not to make money, but because it is a passion of mine. I love all kinds of arts and crafts and always have. However, with some family illnesses that have come up, medical bills have started to surpass the income that I need to pay them. So I thought, eh let's try this. My husband has always been into fishing so I made a vinyl decal for his truck. He liked it so much that he posted on a sportsman forum and other people wanted to order one as well. Of course, most forums do not want random people advertising and selling items on their forums without permission. After chatting with the forum owner, he let us know that he was in need of a person or company to provide his forum decals and after hearing our story, agreed that we could get the job!

Here came the fun part. While I had the idea, I had no idea how to actually make this work. Tons of research went into this as I was just starting, I didn't want to invest a lot of money without knowing if this thing would flop or not. I went with a free storefront on www.freewebstore.com. The reason I made this choice is A)the unknowns mentioned above and B) I didn't need people to be able to find my store by an internet search as the forum would link to the store right on it. Of course I had to create the designs and keep them as simple as possible as we had to be prepared for mass production if this took off. The most time consuming part was building the store. I clearly had no idea how much work this would be.

While it has not been a get rich quick project, it has not been a flop either and each day I am learning as I go. I am tweaking the store each day, switching up products and vendors. So far this has been my favorite transfer tape by far. It's not what I use for my own crafts at home because I can work with less tacky transfer tape. However, I fully believe when you are sending out a finished decal product and expecting the customer to be able to apply it, you need to use high quality transfer tape.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B017Y20RI6/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=tiffanysthrif-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B017Y20RI6&linkId=b386da4d5a0af050662caf303db353fb

For the vinyl, I only use Oracle 651. I prefer the matte for the black and white as it is easier to weed, in my opinion.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B071GPQ9TS/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=tiffanysthrif-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B071GPQ9TS&linkId=499bd82a603c7b174ad060bfd5bd159b

Here is a sample of a decal available on this forum.