E92 transcrpit
Something out there is causing a lot of unnecessary pain and angst in the handmade and creative world right now. Do you feel it?
I certainly do sometimes.
Okay, maybe it’s not exclusively in the fabric and fiber creative space, but I want to talk to you specifically.
It’s the feeling that you're failing. You’re falling behind.
That you're not making enough. That everyone else has figured out something that you haven't. That if you just found the right platform or the right product or the right hack, that one tablespoon of secret sauce, you'd finally be making a real living from your handmade work.
I want to talk about where that feeling actually comes from. And I want to do some math with you today that I think is going to change how you see this from now on.
Alright, so let me just say this right out of the gate before we go any further.
I do NOT make a full living from selling handmade goods alone. I don’t. I never have. And here's the thing - I don't know anyone who actually does. Not consistently anyway and not long term. Not without something else in the mix, supporting it, driving it. And that ‘something’ is not a hack or a magic formula, or simple trick that anyone can do.
For a long time, I thought that meant something was wrong with me. That I was missing something. That there was some strategy or platform or secret that other people had figured out and I hadn't. This may sound uncomfortably familiar.
I agree with the influencers who say, “it’s not your fault.” I agree that it’s not your product either. 100% on board with that. But it’s also not that simple. The solutions that are being sold out there now are massively oversimplified.
So I did the math and that’s where everything changed for me.
But before we get into those numbers, I want to talk about the story that's being sold out there. Because I think it's doing real damage and I think it's time someone set the record straight.
You've seen the ads. I know you have because I see them constantly too.
The one where someone is sitting on a beach, or in their studio, with a laptop telling you they make six figures selling their handmade products online and you could too if you just knew this one thing they're about to share with you for a price.
Or the course that promises to turn your passion into a thriving business in thirty days if you just follow their system.
Or the coach who says you're leaving money on the table and all you need is their framework to unlock the income you deserve.
Here is what I want to say about all of that.
There are bits of truth in all of them, but they are massively oversimplifying the way it all works. I don’t begrudge anyone for trying to share what worked for them at one point in their path. I do that too! Guilty as charged. But, that simply stated, anyone-can-do-this hack, is part of a much bigger system that doesn’t lend itself to social media posting.
If they were consistently and repeatedly making six to seven figures from handmade sales alone - really, reliably, over time - they wouldn't need to spend their days convincing you that you're falling behind. They'd be too busy making the thing and selling it.
The ones who did hit a genuinely rich vein in their business were in many cases extremely lucky, or extremely early to a platform before the algorithm changed, or they had resources and advantages that aren't visible in the highlight reel. And some of them did real work and built something valuable. I'm not dismissing that.
But here is what I know for certain. If that kind of sudden windfall were something that happened consistently and reliably from handmade sales alone, we would see dramatically more people doing it. And sustaining it. And we don't. Because the math doesn't work that way.
And I want to show you exactly why.
One more thing before I get to the math. Because I think the financial cost of this fantasy is obvious once you see the numbers. What's less obvious is what it costs you before you ever get to the math.
When you believe the story - when you genuinely think that other people have figured out the thing you're missing - it does something to your relationship with the work itself. You start looking at what you make through a very distorted lens. Is this good enough? Is this why it's not selling? Should I be making something different? Should I be on a different platform? Should I be doing this at all?
The work that used to bring you genuine satisfaction starts to feel like evidence of your own inadequacy. And that's a particularly cruel thing to have happen to something you love.
I've watched makers walk away from a practice they'd spent years building because they couldn't reconcile the gap between what they were told was possible and what they were actually experiencing. Not because the work wasn't good. Not because there wasn't a real path forward. But because the story they'd been sold made them feel like the problem was them. They simply weren’t smart enough to make this thing they just learned work.
That's the real cost of the fantasy. Not just the money spent on courses that didn't deliver. The confidence eroded. The joy quietly replaced by a low-grade sense of not being enough. The makers who stopped making because the math that was never going to work made them feel like failures.
That's what I want to address today. Before the numbers. Before the solutions. Just - that feeling you've been carrying? It was never yours to carry.
Okay so now to the good stuff. Let’s look at the numbers. I’m going to walk you through something that is real in my own life, but hypothetical in nature. A little math experiment using one of my own products.
I make artsy cocktail napkins. Fabric. Beautifully made. Mitered corners. Fun designs. I sell them in sets of 8. Let's say my hypothetical situation is I built a $125,000 business selling nothing but cocktail napkins at $25 a set. (I’m choosing that number because the math is easy to see, not as a blanket statement about price, okay! Just to be clear.)
To hit $125,000 in sales at $25 per set I need to sell 5,000 sets. And just so you see, at 8 in a set, that’s 40,000 napkins. You’re probably already beginning to see a problem, right?
Okay. Let's say for easy math it takes me one hour to cut, press, sew, package and tag one set. That's probably a little optimistic honestly but let's go with it.
5,000 sets at one hour each. That's 5,000 hours of production time. Like I said, easy hypothetical math.
If I sew for ten hours every single day - no weekends, no holidays, no sick days, no time to eat or photograph or list or ship or answer customer messages - just sewing for ten straight hours every day - it would take me 500 days to make all of them.
That is a year and a half. Not even one full calendar year of production. A year and a half of ten hour days of nothing but sewing cocktail napkins.
For grins, let’s take it a step further...
If I somehow never slept? If I sewed twenty-four hours a day with no breaks at all – I’m a machine on a chair doing nothing else? It would take me 208 days.
But here's the part that really hurts. That $125,000 is not profit. That's total revenue. That's the number before anything comes out.
Before Etsy fees or marketplace fees - that's somewhere between six and fifteen percent depending on the platform and what you're paying for visibility.
Before materials. Fabric. Thread. Interfacing. Packaging. Tags. Labels.
Before shipping supplies. Before the time you spend photographing every set. Writing every listing. Answering every message. Packing every order. Driving to the post office.
Before the advertising you'd need to buy to be found among the millions of other sellers.
When you run those numbers - and I mean honestly, not optimistically - your $125,000 in revenue becomes something closer to $50,000 or $60,000 in actual take-home if you're running extremely lean. And you still had to sew for 500 days straight to get there. So that’s that income over a year and a half.
This is not a criticism of handmade sellers. This is not me saying your work isn't valuable or isn't worth making or isn't worth selling. It absolutely is.
I still do it and I love it.
This is me saying the math of making a full living from handmade sales alone is genuinely, structurally, mathematically impossible for most people at most price points. And the people selling you a course about how to make it work are often making their living from selling the course. Not from the napkins.
No shame in that as long as you understand that’s what’s happening. I have a name for all of this, and we’ll get to that in a second.
So. If you've been feeling like you're failing because your handmade sales aren't covering your bills - I want you to hear this. That's normal. It probably won't cover everything - mine doesn't either. And that's okay. That's actually the whole point of today.
Stop what you’re doing and hear this.
You're not failing. The math was never going to work the way you were told it would.
That feeling of failure isn't information about your skill or your work or your worth as a maker. This is not information to make you stop doing it, or find something else, or become depressed.
It's information about the gap between the story you've been sold and the reality of how income actually works in a handmade creative practice.
And I know this because I felt it too. For longer than I'd like to admit.
I felt it until I looked at what I actually do and had the AHA moment, of “OOOHHHH, that’s what this is. That’s how this whole thing works. I’m not crazy.”
So here's what actually works. And I know this because it's what I do. And it's what the working makers I respect do. And it's what the research consistently shows about how creative practitioners build sustainable income over time.
Let me say that again- it's what the research consistently shows about how creative practitioners build sustainable income over time.
I call it a portfolio career.
Not one thing carrying all the weight. Several things, all connected to the same core skill set, each doing a different job. None of them having to be everything. All of them contributing something.
A portfolio career.
I've talked about this in earlier episodes of this podcast, so this isn’t some fancy new idea that I thought would make a great offering. For me, it looks like contract design work that covers my foundation. Teaching that provides steady reliable income. My fiber art and my online education business as the parts that light me up and grow over time. And a line of smaller sewn goods that fills in the gaps and makes me happy.
None of those alone would support me. Together, they do. And the beauty of it is that they all draw from the same well – a fanatical love of fabric and over thirty years of working with fabric and fiber in various iterations. The skills transfer. The knowledge compounds. The work in one area feeds the others in ways that are hard to predict and just unbelievably satisfying to discover.
What you need is a portfolio career. And that's what we're going to get into over the next couple weeks. I simply can’t sit around and not shout from the rooftops “NO, that’s not how it works. Stop with the fantasy promises.”
And because I always like to come with a solution, I've been building something specifically designed to help you map your own version of this. A real tool. Not a hack. Not a thirty-day system. Something that starts with the honest math and ends with a picture of what your actual sustainable income could look like. We'll get there.
But for this week - I just needed to say this part first. Because I think a lot of you are carrying a feeling that does not rightfully belong to you. You have been convinced of it because then you’ll go looking for the quick fix and the get rich quick promise, that disappoints every time.
You're not failing. You were handed an impossible standard and you've been measuring yourself against it. And now you know why the math never added up. Because it can’t; it never could.
The ads are going to keep coming. The courses are going to keep promising. The six-figure handmade business story is going to keep circulating.
I believe you can make six figures doing the things you like doing. That part isn't farfetched. That part is completely possible, and I intend to prove it myself. But it’s not a one-shot fix. The impossible fantasy is the idea that handmade sales alone get you there. That one product, one platform, one hack does the heavy lifting while you sit back and watch the money roll in. That's the part that doesn't work. That's the part the math just dismantled.
The real path is less glamorous to sell as a course. It doesn't fit into a sixty second video. But it works. And it's what we're getting into next week.
It’s a purposefully planned portfolio of things that don’t require you to constantly shift mindsets.
Next week we're getting into what a portfolio career actually looks like in practice - the four income types, how to map your own, and why this might be the most honest and most sustainable path available to a serious maker right now.
Join me here next week for those details.
I’ll see you then.
