Well bonjour everyone! And welcome to this first episode of what for now I am going to call Members Stories.
If you’re new around here, thanks for being here, and let me introduce myself briefly. My name is Deb and I am the founder of Tizzit.co, a membership community for makers and handmade sellers just like your fabulous self.
The Tizzit HQ community opened its doors 3 years ago now and to celebrate, I thought it would be great to dive a little deeper into the stories of some of Tizzit HQ’s many creative and wonderful members. And that’s exactly what we are going to do today.
The Tizzit community has grown so much over the last 3 years and it’s full of so many people that I am so proud to be acquainted with. There are so many rich stories that deserve to be told and I would love to help strengthen the sense of inspiration and shared experience in the handmade community by providing a space for these stories to be shared.
As always, I like to keep things real so in this interview, we are going to dive into the nitty gritty, not so great parts and challenges that one might face when building a handmade business, but of course also celebrate the wins, successes and the processes that helped make them happen.
All the handmade sellers you’ll hear from in this series even though they all sell handmade products have different business models, they market their products differently, they have different business and life goals, and that’s honestly what I am most excited about!
I hope this will help all of you realize that there’s no single one way to make your business work and that you can really create a business that works for you, not the other way around, and showcase the beautiful mosaic that’s the handmade industry.
It’s a little different than my usual content so for now I only have a few scheduled in but please let me know if you enjoy it – and if so I’ll continue this as an ongoing series and keep bringing you more members’ stories on this channel.
Now, without further ado, let me tell you about Wendy, owner of Flannel Board Fun!
Wendy is the creator/owner of the Flannel Board Fun Etsy Shop and FlannelBoardFun.com, a wonderful handmade business that makes felt sets for kids to use independently on portable travel mats, as well as felt board stories and songs for preschool teachers and librarians to use during their storytimes.
Before starting Flannel Board Fun, Wendy was a preschool teacher for 25 years. Flannel boards were one of her favorite things to do with kids — they loved them! And Wendy loved watching how they helped the kids learn.
In her job, she was able to see just how much the felt boards helped the kids engage in the lesson or conversation topic, making the boards a really unique and valuable tool for preschool teachers and librarians.
Zoom ahead a few years . . . Wendy’s preschool was having a fundraiser, and the preschool director convinced her to set up a booth and sell some of her flannel board sets. It was a huge success (yay!), and after the event one of her co-teachers encouraged Wendy to try selling them on Etsy.
Wendy replied . . . “Etsy? I’ve never heard of that.” (Little did she know what was about to come!!)
The idea stuck with her, and the short story is, she Googled Etsy and soon after that, started her shop!
For the first year and a half she continued working full-time as a teacher and sold her felt boards at craft markets and on Etsy. She considered it a hobby, and she never considered that it could be a business.
And the business continued to grow . . .
As her business grew, she started to think about leaving her job to work on the business full time. When asked what financial point she wanted to be at before leaving her full time job, Wendy said
“I didn’t really have high goals. I don’t want to be a millionaire. . . for me, I had a small financial goal in mind and I was able to do that.”
But Wendy’s goals are bigger than financial goals. As she put it:
“The core of it for me is reaching kids and reaching teachers and librarians . . . this brand can’t be about money, money, money. It’s just not ever going to be that, and that’s how I like it. I feel fulfilled when I know that I’m reaching people.”
Once she felt that the business was bringing in consistent income, she left preschool teaching behind, gradually eased out of craft markets, and focused on her Etsy shop along with starting her own website.
What I love about Wendy’s story is that she set realistic goals that focused on consistency, not crazy-big sales. I think there’s a lot of pressure these days online; you see all these big success stories and it’s like, “Oh my god, if I don’t make a million dollar business out of this business, am I even a business owner?”
Wendy and I started to talk about how seeing consistency in sales is one sign that you may be ready to transition to full-time with your business, and she made this very good point:
“It takes time to figure out what consistency is because one year can look very different from another year. . . and everyone has their different seasons in their particular niche.”
I want anyone reading to remember this – consistency will look different for each business! As you get more experienced with your business, you start to learn what seasons you make more sales in and what seasons are slower for you, and this information is SO valuable.
Wendy went on to say that she definitely went through a few of those sales “peaks and valleys” before she got comfortable with the ups and downs—she remembers messaging me saying
“What’s happening?? I’m not getting any sales!”
—and then a few days or a week later sales picked back up.
This is a totally normal emotion for business owners to have when they first encounter these peaks and valleys—and it’s hard not to panic and think “Oh my God this is the END!”
The wisdom that Wendy has gained with experience is a great mantra for any new seller to tape up next to their computer and read when they worry:
“I don’t panic and I know it will pass, things will pick up again.”
Every maker has certain platforms that work best for their particular business, so next I chatted with Wendy about which ones have worked best for Flannel Board Fun.
Currently, Etsy is her biggest sales generator, driving roughly 75% of her sales— but her website is growing and now accounts for 25%!
Even though Etsy was her first platform, when Wendy joined Tizzit HQ she went back to the dream stage, reassessed each foundational aspect of her business (Etsy included), then made adjustments and improvements.
These improvements were reflected in her Etsy shop—as well as on her website.
The success of her Etsy shop also gave her more time to focus on growing her website.
Wendy’s website is just over a year old, but has had a rapidly growing success rate. She started the website near the beginning of the COVID shutdown, and got a big boost selling storytime felt sets when preschools and libraries became virtual and needed props.
As more and more educators and librarians googled “felt board sets,” her web presence began to grow.
Like many makers, Wendy loves having her own website—not only does it give her more design creativity, but she feels better from a business standpoint because she doesn’t have all her eggs in just the Etsy basket.
A lot of people that join Tizzit HQ already have a business up and running, and what I like to tell them is “Let’s go back a little bit, but let’s not look at it as going back, we’re just looking at what you may have missed, what you might have skipped over, things that you could improve in your foundation, so that when you get to the marketing stage, you are going to get momentum and we’re not going to have to go back and fix things.”
And I’m sure it’s frustrating and annoying, and many makers probably shake their head thinking “You want me to go back and work on my ideal customer when I already have my shop up?”
And I’m like, “Yes, that’s exactly what I want you to do.”
Wendy and I talked about how she felt when she first joined Tizzit and listened to the advice to go back to the Dream stage of the Maker’s Roadmap.
DOWNLOAD THE MAKERS ROADMAP!
She admitted her first thought was much the same—”Do I actually have to start everything over?”
But once she started, she began to see the value:
“It’s not starting everything over – it is so valuable to do it. It made me realize how much I was skimping on so many of those foundational parts of having a business.
I re-evaluated things, I reassessed things. It made me realize things about what I was doing that I hadn’t taken care of. It’s just the best thing you can do. It does not mean that you’re throwing out everything that you’ve already done, if you already have some things accomplished.”
I think it’s so important for other makers to hear the emotions that Wendy went through, because they will realize it’s normal and it’s OK, and how in the end it is totally worth it:
“I remember being so resistant . . . when I had to rebrand, I was like, ‘My font is fine, what are these people talking about?’ And I remember crying in the kitchen with my husband being like, “I get sales, my audience clearly doesn’t care that my font is what I want it to be. I don’t have to change.” And then it was like ‘Yeah, change it, Wendy.’ And I did. I mean, my brand looks so much better.”
When I asked her what the most helpful part of going through each stage of the Maker’s Roadmap with her business was, she answered:
“I mean . . this whole system — I could not be where I am. . . I could be scrambling around doing a million different things, not really understanding what I needed to be doing, but the Roadmap, it has made this business what it is.”
Next Wendy and I talked about marketing, what her favorite platforms are, and how she chose which platforms to use.
YouTube has been a huge success for Wendy, accounting for 85% (WOW) of her email subscribers.
I love this because YouTube is generally not the number one platform for most sellers. But there are some niches where it really works well, and Wendy is a really great example of that.
Since YouTube only allows three lines of description before prompting the reader to click to read more, Wendy said she always puts an email signup prompt in the first line of the description and that has worked really well for her.
YouTube can be hard for sellers to use at first, many get nervous and self conscious about being on camera.
Wendy’s advice?
“Let go of your ego and just have fun, and realize that when you’re watching other people’s videos, you’re not judging them on all these little details that you’re judging yourself on. So it’s fine, just do it!”
Wendy was active on Pinterest before she started her business, making pins since 2015 to direct people to a blog she wrote about felt sets.
So she was familiar with it, enjoyed it, and knew how to make pins—each of these making Pinterest a logical tool to use for marketing her felt sets.
She began by using Pinterest to market her Etsy shop, and now also uses it to send people to her website and YouTube.
I absolutely love Wendy’s journey with Instagram, because it’s a testament to what I talk about so much on Tizzit, that you have to choose marketing venues that work for YOU, and what is a good match for YOU.
When Wendy was working her way through the Maker’s Roadmap, she gave Instagram a try. We have an 8-week Instagram challenge inside the Tizzit HQ library which she joined. She did exactly what she needed to do – posting, commenting, engaging—showing up regularly.
But she struggled with it. Consistency was a challenge for her, but the hardest thing of all was the “fit” between Instagram and Wendy. As she puts it,
“Your Instagram course was incredibly helpful. I think my feed looked fantastic. I had comments, but I couldn’t go in and comment on stuff. I just was like, “This is not me.” I didn’t feel genuine at all. And that’s a huge part of me.”
What Wendy is talking about here is SO important. You won’t be successful on social media if you can’t be consistent, and you need to enjoy it or you won’t be consistent. Wendy realized the enjoyment part was missing for her:
“I’m very like, I tell it how it is. I can’t be fake. And I felt like I was being fake. I don’t think that people on Instagram are being fake, they’re genuinely enjoying themselves. But I wasn’t genuinely enjoying myself, so I was having to fake it.”
She realized it wasn’t a good match for her, and on top of it, she felt overloaded. She was doing YouTube videos, Pinterest, email marketing, and Instagram, and it was too much.
I love her story because it’s a great example of the fact that you can actually build your business without social media if you want to and use search engines instead.
It’s just a different type of marketing model, and there’s trade-offs to every strategy, but you can make it work whichever way you want—I think it’s so important to know that.
Sometimes you have to go through something like Wendy did with Instagram to realize the issues that FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) can create, AND how you can turn FOMO into JOMO (Joy of Missing Out) when you walk away from choices that aren’t a good match for you or your business.
Experience can be a powerful teacher, as Wendy learned:
“Maybe I had to go through trying to be everywhere, realizing it was just burning me out and not being successful, before I could listen . . . maybe I had to learn it”
As we talked about earlier, Wendy’s email list comes primarily from her YouTube channel.
For her, email is a way to share tips about early literacy, early learning and learning through play. Wendy shared:
“I love having an email list. I don’t know how much it contributes to my sales, but I know I have great open rates and great click rates and nobody’s leaving it, so I feel like I have an audience that appreciates what I do. A huge part of this business for me really is sharing early literacy and early learning and learning through play with my people.”
She went on to add:
“Of course I want sales. It’s a business, I need sales. But I really love the email part of it because I’m sharing those things. And it seems more personal because I’m emailing it to people, versus posting a video on YouTube and people are watching it . . . when my email people are watching it, I’m like, “Yay.”
Email helps fulfill Wendy’s goal of really connecting with parents and educators and sharing early learning and literacy tools.
And again I want to say, look at how Wendy has found a marketing tool that she enjoys, and that’s a great fit for her.
What happens is that email fills her cup and she loves doing it, so then she is motivated to be consistent and send creative emails on a regular basis that really connect with her audience. . . beautiful!!
Wendy recently started selling digital patterns for her felt sets. She went back and re-did most of the Maker’s Roadmap Dream stage inside Tizzit HQ because the pattern audience is a different audience than the people who are buying the pre-made sets:
“There were definite similarities in there, so it wasn’t as much work, but I went back through that Dream stage . . . and used the Roadmap to do that. It’s so helpful, I couldn’t do it without it!”
I asked her how long the digital product idea was in her head before she decided to go for it, and Wendy explained that she would periodically get Etsy messages saying “Do you sell patterns?”
At first she had no intention of offering them. But then she started to think about it more:
“Because I’m using the correct pricing strategy my sets aren’t cheap. And the more people were asking me for patterns, the more I realized, well, that makes them accessible to people.
Preschool teachers have low budgets, some librarians have really low budgets. So I wanted those people who couldn’t either afford or just were craftier to be able to have access to them too. . .. I just want kids in all areas to have access to early literacy stuff. And so that was what patterns were going to do.”
So Wendy decided to go for it! She went back through the Maker’s Roadmap, launched her product, and is achieving a personal goal or reaching more educators and more kids to increase literacy:
“From a business perspective, it’s a lot of work . . . it took way more work than I realized it was going to . . . but I’m happy I did it, and people are ordering them.”
I just love how Wendy chose to do this not to increase profits, but because of her vision and her values.
It’s so lovely because she could have chosen to do it because digital products are a passive income source and are more scalable than it is to sell a lot of physical products, which is also true and of course came into her decision —but that wasn’t what she based her decision on, it was about her passion to spread literacy to those who couldn’t afford her felt sets:
“Of course I have financial goals, certain financial goals, and I want to meet those financial goals, but really the core of it for me is reaching kids and reaching teachers and librarians. So patterns were just another way to do that . . . I feel fulfilled when I know that I’m reaching people.”
When I asked Wendy what she likes the most about her business, she said:
“Partly, what I was just talking about, which is, being able to still have an impact on kids. I really missed that part of being a teacher interacting with them . . . this gives me some of that.”
Wendy just loves getting messages telling her how much someone’s niece loves her new felt set, or a teacher telling her how they just had the greatest storytime.
Of course she also loves working for herself, working from home, and not changing diapers on a daily basis (!!) — but the primary reward for her is reaching librarians, teachers and kids.
Wendy had to think a bit about this question.
For her, there were two areas of success – financial/business success and overall success.
“Of course I want to reach certain financial goals. Financial success is reaching the goals that I have set for myself. I feel successful if my business is running smoothly, if I have systems in place and they’re working, if I can understand the statistics that I’m seeing. And if I am organized; if I feel good on a daily basis running my business, I feel successful.”
Beyond that though, the true success of her business is about her goal to spread literacy:
“It seems so cheesy, but it really does come back to reaching people . . . I created this business because of wanting to have an influence on kids and maybe spark inspiration in brand new preschool teachers, or almost burnt out preschool teachers, and librarians. That’s why I started it, so success for me is doing that.”
Did you just get goosebumps reading that?? — because I did!! Wendy is so in tune with her passion and how it’s driving her business, and I just love that.
I am SO grateful to Wendy for doing this Interview and want to shout out one more big THANK YOU to her for taking the time to sit down with me and share her story.
I’m incredibly grateful to have people like her inside of the community that are so active and supporting and kind, and who give so much great advice and feedback.
I hope those of you reading this will walk away feeling more confident about all the ups and downs you have gone through – and will go through – in your own business, and will remember the importance of creating your business in a way that is a good fit for you and for your products.
If you haven’t joined us inside Tizzit HQ I hope this interview helped you appreciate that you SHOULD!! Come over and check it out all that Tizzit HQ has to offer:
BECOME A TIZZIT HQ MEMBER AND TURN THE HOBBY YOU LOVE INTO INCOME YOU’LL ADORE
I hope you enjoyed this first ever “Members’ stories” interview, there are more to come!
Thanks for reading and until next time, au revoir!
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