This time last year, Josh Pigford launched a small handmade homewares shop called Cedar & Sail. He did it to scratch an itch to both make a physical product and to get back to doing e-commerce again.
He went into this with zero expectations. Really, he just wanted to cover his costs so it wasn’t a hobby that he was losing a lot of money to do. Here we are, at the end of year one, so let’s take a look back and see how he faired.
Revenue
Gross Revenue: $9152 Number of Sales: 242 Average Order Value: $38
2017 Revenue Breakdown
Sales Channels
Josh sold his products across five different sales channels:
Online Store
Amazon
Wholesale
Etsy
Local Markets
Here’s a percent of sales breakdown by channel.
2017 Source by Revenue Breakdown
Local Markets
What really surprised him was the amount of revenue that came from doing local markets. 50% of all the revenue for the year came from doing a series of markets in the last 3 months. And what’s crazy is that He did the first one in October on a whim, purely because it was happening in his neighborhood and would be really low-hassle to do (his booth was literally a block from his house).
It was successful enough that He decided to just start doing as many as he could register for through the end of the year. He ended up doing five of them and the majority of them were very much worth his time.
They were also great for meeting other makers and vendors and the community as a whole.
Amazon Handmade
Handmade is basically Amazon’s Etsy competitor and with relatively little work it did nearly 80% better than Etsy. He is guessing due to the reach of Amazon’s distribution and the fact that Handmade items show up in regular Amazon searches.
Wholesale
Josh started the year thinking Wholesale would be a sizable portion of revenue, but we really only ended up with a couple of wholesale orders.
Honestly, Josh is glad he didn’t end up with more as he found producing large quantities of the same item was actually pretty time consuming. He has a limited number of molds that he uses to make a given item and so making 10+ of a single item actually is a lot more work for what amounts to basically half the profit.
Products
Josh launched in January with 6 products and 4 color variations on each product, for a total of 24 different SKUs. He ended December with 13 products and 6 color variations for 78 different SKUs. That doesn’t include the dozens of limited edition color variations and candles he did.
That’s…a lot. Especially for one dude in his garage.
He wish he could say he ended the year knowing what his best sellers were, but the fact is he had so many variations, there’s just no way of knowing.
Part of him likes the variety he is offering, but it also makes fulfilling orders much more time-intensive since he can’t batch them. The variety works really well at local markets, so he may just keep doing what he is doing but keep the online offering more limited. Haven’t figured that part out yet.
Profit
He put every penny back into the business so essentially came away with no profit. He will likely do the same for 2018 as well. Using the revenue to buy new equipment, try new products and purchase supplies makes the whole thing much more laid back and interesting. Eventually, he does plan on having Cedar & Sail be a profitable business but he has got his main business that’s his focus for the foreseeable future anyway.
Buid small handmade shop from scratch
This time last year, Josh Pigford launched a small handmade homewares shop called Cedar & Sail. He did it to scratch an itch to both make a physical product and to get back to doing e-commerce again.
He went into this with zero expectations. Really, he just wanted to cover his costs so it wasn’t a hobby that he was losing a lot of money to do. Here we are, at the end of year one, so let’s take a look back and see how he faired.
Revenue
Gross Revenue: $9152
Number of Sales: 242
Average Order Value: $38
Sales Channels
Josh sold his products across five different sales channels:
Here’s a percent of sales breakdown by channel.
Local Markets
What really surprised him was the amount of revenue that came from doing local markets. 50% of all the revenue for the year came from doing a series of markets in the last 3 months. And what’s crazy is that He did the first one in October on a whim, purely because it was happening in his neighborhood and would be really low-hassle to do (his booth was literally a block from his house).
It was successful enough that He decided to just start doing as many as he could register for through the end of the year. He ended up doing five of them and the majority of them were very much worth his time.
They were also great for meeting other makers and vendors and the community as a whole.
Amazon Handmade
Handmade is basically Amazon’s Etsy competitor and with relatively little work it did nearly 80% better than Etsy. He is guessing due to the reach of Amazon’s distribution and the fact that Handmade items show up in regular Amazon searches.
Wholesale
Josh started the year thinking Wholesale would be a sizable portion of revenue, but we really only ended up with a couple of wholesale orders.
Honestly, Josh is glad he didn’t end up with more as he found producing large quantities of the same item was actually pretty time consuming. He has a limited number of molds that he uses to make a given item and so making 10+ of a single item actually is a lot more work for what amounts to basically half the profit.
Products
Josh launched in January with 6 products and 4 color variations on each product, for a total of 24 different SKUs. He ended December with 13 products and 6 color variations for 78 different SKUs. That doesn’t include the dozens of limited edition color variations and candles he did.
That’s…a lot. Especially for one dude in his garage.
He wish he could say he ended the year knowing what his best sellers were, but the fact is he had so many variations, there’s just no way of knowing.
Part of him likes the variety he is offering, but it also makes fulfilling orders much more time-intensive since he can’t batch them. The variety works really well at local markets, so he may just keep doing what he is doing but keep the online offering more limited. Haven’t figured that part out yet.
Profit
He put every penny back into the business so essentially came away with no profit. He will likely do the same for 2018 as well. Using the revenue to buy new equipment, try new products and purchase supplies makes the whole thing much more laid back and interesting. Eventually, he does plan on having Cedar & Sail be a profitable business but he has got his main business that’s his focus for the foreseeable future anyway.
—From Medium | By Josh Pigford
One reply to “Buid small handmade shop from scratch”
Xcage
Very interesting story!