I turned my Etsy Shop into a multi-million dollar [Music] business I did that over the course of the past eight or nine years now and I wanted to talk about exactly how I got here every step of my journey I originally started selling my artwork on Etsy on my 18th birthday I literally woke up in the morning was like ah it's my birthday went to the bank opened a bank account started an Etsy Shop it was the first day I legally could do all of that on my own without my parents or anything and I listed my first paintings I started out all doing hand painted canvas art such as this and I ran my Etsy shop for a couple of years just and painting paintings on canvas I also did like wood and I did some trays and then I got a cricket and started making like water bottles and then I made stickers and it all kind of went from there but from the time that I was 18 to 20ish I just ran my Etsy shop on the side while I was going to college I went to loyala Chicago for undergrad I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and then went there for college I majored in political science sence and history and my ay shop was really just like a side gig I did custom orders I did all kinds of like quotes and different designs people would request and then some things I thought on my own all from my tiny little apartment where I lived with my sister little did I know that like 6 years later I would be kind of on the other side of the country but still with Melanie um and now she works for me while I was going to college I had no intention of doing this full-time whatsoever it wasn't even on my radar like my Etsy Shop was a hobby and then the summer before my senior year I did my Etsy Shop more full-time I was making things on my Cricut um customizing ring dishes still doing paintings all the time but I really enjoyed just like running the Etsy shop on my own I just thought it was really fun the whole process like the photos making the listings making the new products so I did a ton of custom orders a ton of ring dishes a ton of like signs for weddings and things like that Christmas gifts it's just interesting now cuz I know that those things are still floating out there somewhere and like I just totally didn't know and the customers didn't know like where all this was headed but um when I was a junior right before that I started selling stickers so that's when things started really taking off actually it's kind of funny how I got my iPad so my very first iPad I got through school I was in a research program where I was doing like a really intensive history project and we had a $500 research stipend and we had to use our stipend because otherwise the program thought that like they wouldn't be able to get funding for the next year and so a lot of people would travel to archives to find documents that they needed to look through for their history projects my project was all based on an online archive so I pitched to my program hey can I get an iPad so that I can flip through this archive and take notes on my computer more easily and they were like sure we'll get you an iPad and I was like wow this is amazing and it was super helpful for that project but it also was great cuz I could get procreate on my iPad and I used it to design stickers so in November of 2018 I introduced my very first sticker and it says women belong in all places where decisions are being made which is an RBG quote and that was something that was just like very important to me as someone who's very into gender equality so I did a bunch of stickers that were kind of similar um they were all like kind of law adjacent and very much focused on gender equality and all of that and then I just started creating other designs and I got requests on Etsy and then people started asking me to sell my stickers wholesale through Etsy and that was kind of my first taste of that so I remember I released the very first sticker and got three orders that day which was a weird feeling because i' had never really gotten like more than one order in a day and it was it was awesome cuz I was still getting consistent orders but three in a day I was like wow I just put up this sticker and posted on my Instagram and all of that I was like wow this is great I kept getting more and more orders for it I introduced new stickers again more and more orders and I just kept thinking wow these are really popular so I made a bunch of sticker designs and then after I graduated with my masters I moved to North Carolina to go to law school and that summer my only job was my Etsy shop and I did craft fairs at Sola which is a local cafe in Raleigh and that was like my first time really doing any craft fairs that were super like successful and that was super fun I got to meet a lot of people who are local got a lot of Instagram followers from it I didn't even have an Instagram when I started I think I started my Instagram on the recommendation of my my freshman year roommate who was in ad are and she was like you should have an Instagram for your art and I was like oh I'm not into that I don't like social media so what I did was I had been posting my like canvases on Facebook groups for like colleges so I was getting like 30 40 likes on just like a random photo and I was like oh I was like okay I guess every time I paint a canvas I'll just post a photo so I just posted like One Singular still image every time I painted a new canvas and that was the extent of it and then story became a thing and I was like oh it's too much I don't want to deal with that but then when I was doing more and more of like my Etsy shop and stuff I was like wow this can be fun I like connecting with other artists and I like talking to people and like customers would find me on Instagram and just like kind of became this whole thing so then Instagram became like my go-to place so at that point stickers were telling really well at my craft fairs and every time I introduced a new sticker design like they sold and then I realized through all the requests I was getting on Etsy to sell wholesale that I should start a profile on Fair and fair is a wholesale platform that I still use to this day that connects retailers who own stores with Brands who produce products and design products so I started adding my stickers on there and at first I got rejected from Fair because you have to apply and they basically told me like we don't have stickers on here they were trying to be all like handmade you know just like very like high quality like Artisan things that's what fair was trying to do when it first started and so they were like we don't want stickers on our website that's silly and then a few months later I noticed they had let a sticker brand on that does just stickers and they were a bigger company and they did a ton of stickers and they actually licensed one of my designs and so I came back to fair and I said hey you already have one of my designs on your website you have this bigger sticker company so it seems like you're letting people who sell stickers on now can I be unfair and they said yeah yeah sure so I was I think like literally the second sticker brand on fair then from there it was actually crazy like that was my first year of law school at that point and I remember in January and February of 2020 before the pandemic I was waking up at like 5:00 in the morning I was packing up my ansy orders that I was packing up my fair orders I put them in envelopes and packages and whatever I dropped them off in the mail room of my lost school and then I went to class at like 8:00 in the morning and that's what I did every single day for like 2 months months and then the pandemic hit and it was all over from there that's when the fun really begins March of 2020 law school went online and I honestly was like few I'm tired I was doing law school which in and of itself one L year is so hard so I was like great so then law school went online and went past fail I was like wellow if everything's past fail mistakes are lower I can like d-stress I can unwind I mean it was the pandemic so everyone was kind of freaking out and trying to figure out what life was about and I was just so thoroughly distracted I was pretty much just every day in my apartment I was painting and drawing and making videos and posting and then I got on Tik Tok because it was becoming a huge thing during the pandemic and I actually downloaded it in the fall of 2019 so it was pretty new and I was like o what's this and then I like flipped through a few videos and I was like oh my God this is so addicting I don't have to time for this and then I was like all right I'll dabble with it um during the pandemic I started posting um and it was really fun I was doing just like DIY projects that I was like painting and whatever else the first thing that went really viral was me painting black floral it just went crazy like I think I got like 600,000 views and I was like Flor flabber cast and I was like wow this has a lot of potential I sold so many art prints of that design um the canvas sold immediately so I started doing more of that it wasn't a repeating pattern at the time I didn't really do a ton of like patterns it was more painting still and I was doing that all summer dickersin and the fact that I was in law school that started kind of catching on and then by the end of the that summer of 2020 I was thinking this could be a full-time job I was also at a Crossroads in my path in law school I have a really great internship the that summer I was doing something I was like super interested in it was all about the First Amendment and I was still thinking like I love this I'm super interested but I love doing my art and doing social media for it more and I was deciding do I want to pursue a job in big law which is going to work for like a giant law firm in DC or New York I was thinking do I want to do that I could pay off my loans so much faster because I was living on Federal loans or do I want to go do something that I'm super passionate about more kind of like my internship it's just this whole thing so I was trying to game out like how am I going to pay off my loans how am I going to be happy with my job like what am I going to do and then I realized I could just do this little art gig full time what if I did that so I was trying to figure out how to make that work like financially but it became clearer and clearer to me that it might be possible to actually match the income I would be making in big law through my artwork if I played my cards right so I buckled down and I was like I think I'm going to do this full time and I'm going to make it work and you know when you have like what was it what would it be like six figure debt um it's a pretty good motivator to get organized and figure your life out so I was working super hard law school was still online I was going hard at law school going hard at my business I wasn't ready to be like I'm dropping out because that would be so drastic I had spent my whole life preparing to go to law school I spent two years trying to get in it's just it's just a lot like to give up you know at the drop of the hat so that wasn't an option and it was online so it wasn't unmanageable to do my business and loss at the same time I was in sitting at the same desk where I packed orders um I would literally like Finish class I would rewatch the lecture and I would pack orders at the same time that's pretty much like how I spent all of the pandemic by like December of 2020 it became apparent to me that there was no more room in my apartment I started selling notebooks I started selling planners and I was on the second floor there was a package room I had to go drag my like 50 lb packages I was living by myself my 50 lb packages from the package locker room up my like into my car drive around my complex come up the stairs put it on like a shelf I had bought like a bookshelf from HomeGoods and was like this will work for storing all my product and then my stickers were under my bed they were in my closet it was everywhere and then I would package out my orders I would leave them outside my door and my USPS man was super nice would come up my stairs and grab all my stuff every day and I was like this is not sustainable I need an office space and I was like you know what let's just do it like I didn't really think twice I was like let's just do it I signed a 2-year lease for my office it's like 1,000 square ft and I was like I also need an employee my mom had helped me by um packing my wholesale orders so she I literally got all of my sticker designs I took like one pack of each two packs of each I drove them to Chicago at some point during the pandemic I don't even remember it must have been the summer of 2020 I set up in my childhood bedroom and office to pack sticker orders and all of my wholesale orders that had stickers in them shipped from there and we had like this two location thing then I'd order more stickers for her I'd order more stickers for me but I needed more help than that it was becoming very obvious like I wasn't able to keep up with orders on my own so I got the office and then I hired part-time employees like right away and that's when my first notebook Tik Tok went viral that was crazy exhausting and wild and it just all went from there it was like I introduced notebooks then I introduc planners the first round of planners were completely like the worst misprints I've ever had I had to get all of those replace but then the Tik Tok about it went viral and then there was just all of the stuff going on it was just wild and then I got engaged and then I realized I was growing out of that office space sooner than I had anticipated and so I started looking for a new office space and then by this time I was back in law school in person for my third year and wow I just can't even believe how much stuff I was doing at that point I was like planning my wedding going to School running my business that was growing like 100% year-over-year even more than that I think from 2020 to 2021 it grew 18 times and then from 2021 to 2022 it grew three or four times over so it was a lot and then by the spring of 2022 when I was getting ready to graduate from law school I was on The Today Show which this morning in our series she made it two entrepreneurs whose been businesses are blooming our today lifestyle and commerce contributor Jill Martin is here to tell us more good morning Jill morning over the past s years 24-year-old Elise Burns has been working hard on her which was an amazing opportunity um and that was all just kind of out of nowhere was a super crazy story I have a whole YouTube video about it from way back like explaining how that whole process happened and the day that the Today Show clip aired was also my last day of law school where I took my last final and then I graduated from law school moved into this office from the old office then we opened Millan Meadow a few months later all the while all kinds of crazy viral Tik toks and grab bags and you name it hiring six new employees in one summer wow and then yeah last year I got married and that's pretty much it now I'm just chilling but for the past like 8 years if has been an absolutely insane Whirlwind Journey that it's just like mind blowing for me to reflect on um but has been full of like a lot of lessons and mistakes and successes and all of that stuff but I would love to get into more like my big takeaways and tips of like what I've learned over the past eight years kind of taking my business from a small little Etsy shop to literally a multi-million dollar business so I will have all of that in part two stay tuned don't forget to like if you have any questions or comments let me know and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss part two