I have made $1.6 million selling polymer clay food charms since I started doing this full time in 2012. I now only work on this business on average 5 hours a week and it's making me six figures in annual sales. So in this video, let's talk through how exactly I did this, where I'm selling the charms if I make the charms myself, and what the biggest lessons have been along the way. So how do I make that much money from selling just polymer clay charms? Every year in business I had a specific focus because it's much more effective to do one thing well than to do a mediocre job at a lot of different things, right. So one year I would focus on just Facebook, another year I would do just Instagram or TikTok or blogging and so on. I have tried all the things. I know firsthand what works and what doesn't, and I will share that with you. There are really only a handful of things that helped me get to six figures. What are those things? Well, I had invested so much time into social media and gave that a good effort push. I have tens of thousands of followers on my Facebook and Instagram that took me years to build as a result. And I can say with confidence that wasn't what helped me build my business to six figures in sales. In the grand scheme of things, social media didn't really matter and it still doesn't for me. But what did, and what consistently brought me from just a few sales every few days to having multiple sales every single day has always been doing media outreach. That is, I get my products on the pages of print magazines or in blogs or websites that get a lot of traffic, like BuzzFeed or Huffington Post. It is entirely free to do aside from the occasional cost of making some product samples and shipping it to the magazine. And what was even more amazing was it wasn't temporary. Unlike social media, where I have this constant pressure to crank out post after post, which only live for like a few hours, and then it gets buried by other people's posts. I went from one level like making a few hundred dollars, maybe a thousand bucks on a good holiday month to an entirely different level in my business because of being featured in the media. I'm talking about like regular five figure sales months, and it stayed that way for months and years. Customers would buy from me saying they found my work in a magazine that I was featured in months ago. Also, consider that when you get your products in a magazine or a YouTuber talks about your work, that is a third party endorsement, which is so much more powerful than you talking about your own work. That's like someone you trust, recommending this great new restaurant in town, making you much more likely to take their advice and actually try it. But say the restaurant owner tells you that they're the best, you might wonder if they're just trying to make a sale because they're biased. Right? So how did I get my products in the media? It is actually really easy to do. I'm surprised not more people do this. If you were to measure the amount of resources like time and energy that go into social media versus media outreach, your resources will yield much bigger, better and faster results if you put them towards doing media outreach instead. The expectation is to post something on social media like at least once a day, right? If not a few times a week. And then you have to multiply that by like all of the different platforms versus with media outreach. I've only ever done that in spurts. I don't do that daily or weekly. I only focus on doing it a few times a year and it's maybe like a week's project for that quarter, for example. So how you do it? There are two phases and the most important phase, which if you get this right, makes the second phase easier and less important for it to be perfect. And that is research, figuring out where to get your products featured. If they've done media outreach before and they've not had much success with it, it's usually because the research wasn't done right. You have to be very discerning about who to pitch to. You have to think outside the box. So one way to do this is if you sell jewelry, don't just pitch to magazines, influencers or websites that just talk about jewelry all the time, which is a common trap most people fall into. It's the obvious choice, right? But that makes it so much more competitive and therefore harder to get results from. You need your pitch and your product to stand out, and in order to do that, you have to pitch outside of your niche. For example, I sell scented food jewelry. I could pitch to jewelry places, but I don't have much success doing that. But I can pitch to places that talk about perfume or fragrances as a topic or food, lifestyle, kids parenting. I have a smores necklace, so I might pitch that to a outdoor camping magazine. So you really do need to be creative here and you will see a lot more success. Then the second phase is writing the actual pitch in the follow up to the magazine. Most people get this wrong. I used to think that it's super important that you have a specific order of words that you write in your email to increase your chances of being featured. But over the years I've seen that your pitch can be mediocre, but if you've done your research right, they won't care because they're going to fall in love with your product regardless. Having said that, writing a good pitch is within your control, so why not spend a bit of time to make sure it's good, right? The problem people tend to have with pitching is they come from a place of desperation and neediness. Please feature me. I need you to feature me. This is me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. It's very self-absorbed, and you're not coming from a place of service when you do this. Instead, you really want to make it about them and how you can serve them, which really just means do your research well and you've already done the work of serving them. You've essentially ensured that you are a product they will very likely find appealing to introduce to their audience or readers. And that is extremely valuable to them because that's their job and they're always looking for products to show to their audience. Media outreach has really helped me spread the word so quickly and easily to millions of people for free. And I am not exaggerating. If you need a deeper dive into how to do media outreach, I go into much more detail in a free workshop that I teach. There is a link in the description below also go watch that after this. Now, once I built my business to a full time income level, I started having the cash flow to invest in other forms of marketing. And so doing things like paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram was the second biggest lever for bringing in sales for me. I already knew my products sold well to the right audience and now I had the budget for it so that enabled me to jump into doing ads. These days I don't even do much media outreach anymore. Personally, I have an assistant that does it for me and she does like 20 pitches for me every month. Even though I use a lot of paid ads. Here's my I don't necessarily recommend it to most shop owners. Paid ads requires a lot of testing before you even see any sales come out of it. And you need to always be doing it. You can't treat it like something you start and stop whenever you like. So it is extremely risky for most people. Only do paid ads If you are already making healthy sales organically for free, you have a consistent budget for it, and you're willing to take the time to really learn how to do it well. Pretend your business is like a garden. Organic sales that you've gotten for free are like the healthy plants that have already sprouted, right? Paid ads are like the fertilizer. If your garden is already growing, the fertilizer can help it flourish even more. But if you haven't planted anything, no amount of fertilizer will make anything grow. Paid ads will only amplify what is already happening in your business. If your business has zero sales right now, you are going to keep getting zero sales even if you do ads. But say you're already regularly getting ten sales every month from your own organic forms of marketing, then ads has a potential to get you 50 sales, 100 sales, even a thousand sales if you have the budget for it. That's not to say that you can have a totally brand new shop and fail doing ads. It is absolutely possible. You just need to know how. Which goes back to the whole thing about taking the time to learn how to do it right. So that's the how. Now let's talk about where I sell my charms. Do I sell on Etsy? Is that a good place to set up shop? Most people make this huge mistake. Think of it this way. They invest a ton of time, energy, money into a rental house, which is essentially what Etsy is. You invest in making it cozy. You invest in growing a garden and making it your own. Except deep down, you know, it's not really your own house. It's your landlord's house. And every month when you're paying for rent, your landlord is growing their equity and you have zero. If you're a landlord decides to kick you out, they can just like how Etsy can just shut down your store at any time and it is out of your control. So what is the alternative? Now, don't get me wrong, renting isn't bad, and depending on where you live, it makes financial sense. Like how some people don't want or need to make money from selling their work. Then by all means, Etsy is totally fine for them. But if you want your business to pay you a meaningful income, one day quit your job, work from home doing what you love, you need to invest in your own house that you buy. In other words, have your own website. I built my own site using Shopify and yes, buying a house is a higher barrier to entry. For a lot of people, it is recommended to put down a 20% down payment, just like how having your own website requires you to pay a monthly fee even if you haven't made a single sale yet. But the advantage is your house is your own. You control it. You can do whatever you want with it, just like with your own website. No one can take it away from you. And the more you invest into your house or your website, you just keep stacking equity into your own name over the long term so you keep reaping the rewards of whatever you invested in years ago for promoting your business. That's why, selling on Etsy often feels a lot more like this roller coaster. We're never sure when the next sale is going to come in. One day you might be getting a ton of sales, in the next it's completely quiet. That's because you have far less control over Etsy than you do with your own website. Your own site might take longer to get started, especially if you don't know what you're doing, but you get to have more stability and long term success. And I would choose that any day over the Etsy roller coaster. So I do have an Etsy shop and I do sell on there quite a bit, but I don't focus my attention on building up my Etsy shop. So many people start selling on Etsy and then they struggle to make sales because it's too competitive and you're often neck and neck with other shops that live in countries where the value of their currency is so low that they can afford to charge much lower than you, or they're just hobbyists and they're just not priced right. Whereas you're actually trying to make a living from your business. I have made a lot of sales from Etsy. I have made $114,000 in sales on Etsy since I started my shop. But here is what I do instead that made a huge difference. I focus on selling directly on my own website and I use Shopify. I have made almost $1.7 Million selling my charms on my Shopify site, that is 14.89X more money from my own website compared to Etsy. Most people start selling on Etsy and then they struggle to have their own website because of course managing Etsy is more than enough work for you to do. There is no time to do anything else. But now you're stuck with Etsy and it's so hard to switch gears to something else. If I had put all my eggs in the Etsy basket at the start, I really don't think I would be seeing seven figures of sales from selling my charms online. Now, I'm not saying don't ever sell on Etsy, Etsy can be great, but don't just sell on Etsy alone and it shouldn't be your primary focus. So how did I continue to make six figures in sales every single year for over a decade? My shop isn't just a trend, or it didn't ride some social media viral wave. So how was I able to achieve consistency in my paycheck year after year? In the early days I also did this one thing that I feel many other shop owners don't do. Something I see a lot in Facebook groups or Reddit threads is people complaining about their customers. Lost packages, customers leaving them one-star reviews because the customers themselves didn't read the description properly, so it wasn't the shop's fault. Customers being super rude. But I'm often shocked at how many people respond in a very defensive way. I think it's easy to feel like the customer is taking advantage of you or being disrespectful, and so the knee-jerk reaction is to defend ourselves, right? I understand that we work so hard to make our products promote our shop. I get it. Here's the thing. If you can't empathize with your customer, they are not going to leave your shop with a positive impression and therefore will not feel compelled to tell their friends about you. Most of my sales have come from word of mouth, and I think a lot of people don't realize how powerful that is because you can't see it happening, right? You can't measure it. But just think about how we naturally do this so often in our everyday life when we're hanging out with friends or family or colleagues. People talk about their favorite restaurants, their favorite food, favorite books, the favorite people, their favorite new purchases. Which could have been your product. I think we need to be a lot more compassionate and understand that some people are just having a really hard day. Maybe their dog died that morning, and if they spend $50 at your shop the week before and your package then was lost and you refuse to work with them on a resolution that would make them happy, how do you think they're going to feel? You have essentially just added to their grief and sadness and frustration. You just never know what is going on in someone else's life. So I believe just treat everyone with kindness, even if they didn't offer that to you themselves. That's on them. And you can't control that. But we can absolutely control how we respond, right? It's a huge part of my philosophy to do whatever we can to make our customers happy, even if it means we are losing money on a customer and not making any profit. That to me is worth it. On average, I'm still making money from my other sales that I'm getting. But I also know that this is going to make an impact on the other person. They're going to feel it and they'll want to tell people about my shop. Now, I don't practice kindness just because of that, but because I just don't want to focus on expanding negativity. Now, these days, since we are doing well, of course, if I have a very difficult customer that is completely unreasonable and nothing we do can make them happy, we often just give a full refund and just call it at that. But try to save that for the absolute last resort if you can, especially in the beginning. So many of my customers come back to shop for me again and again, and that is because of this. If you care about your business, you have to set your own ego aside or it's going to get in the way of your growth. Now, I sell six figures worth in charms every year. That is a lot of charms, and do I make them all myself? I'll get to that in a bit. But first, how did I go about creating designs and products that were guaranteed to sell? In the earlier years of my business, many of my initial sales were custom orders. People would come to my shop and see what I could do, and then they would email me or message me to ask if I could do this other thing instead. If I felt I could pull it off, I would do it. And if the item turned out really good, I would make it a permanent part of my product line. And this often leads to that item becoming a best selling product. I often see other makers focus too much of their time on creating products that they want to make, which is totally fine and healthy if you're just doing it for creativity's and enjoyment's sake. But if you are wanting to run a business that makes money, you have to consider what customers want as well. Designing products in a silo all by yourself can be dangerous because we have no idea if people want what you make enough to pay money for it. But if we find the overlap between what you love to make and what other people want to buy, you're going to have a much greater chance of success creating products that sell like hotcakes. I have an entire module in my A Sale A Day Program that talks about how to do this in more depth, in case you are interested in a more step by step framework to follow. Now, let me ask you this. Which do you think sold more often and generated more revenue, a $28 necklace or $49.99 for the same item? I'll tell you in a bit. In order to make six figures in sales selling polymer clay jewelry, I had to charge accordingly and be very strategic about my product pricing. I would have to work a lot more if my prices were lower. Right now a necklace I sell is on average $30 to $40, and that's considered high for being just polymer clay jewelry. Most other shops selling similar items charge a fraction of what I charge. Imagine if you were only charging $15 per necklace you would have to work twice as much to make charms to get to the same amount of sales as me. So many people think that in order to make more sales, you need to charge lower prices to make it easy for people to buy. And this can be true in some circumstances. But generally I've also seen that most of us artists are not charging enough for our own work. Charging less isn't going to solve your sales problems, nor is it going to get you to six figures without a lot of work. I did surprising tests recently and $49.99 was the price that sold more necklaces for me and made me more money than selling the same item at $28. Now, I'm not saying go out there and double your prices right now because I definitely had pricing pushback in the earlier years of my business. People will often balk at my pricing, saying it was too expensive for what it was. And it really took some strategy to get to those higher prices. People who buy my necklaces are usually moms, aunts buying gifts for little girls, and they just couldn't justify paying more than ten or 15 bucks for something that they thought would break in a few days. This was an ongoing problem that I managed to fix by answering that question: "How can I justify a higher necklace price?" So I spent a long time working on this from the inside out. I started with getting higher quality chains that were beautiful and sturdy. Rather than buying from regular suppliers, I got them custom manufactured with my exact specifications. I switch from using Sculpey III brand of polymer clay, which is easier to work with on the hands because it's softer but is far more brittle after you bake it, so it breaks more easily. Now I use Premo polymer clay, which is harder to work with but produces a charm that doesn't break as easily. I did a rebrand and changed my logo into something that once looked really cutesy and in a way, juvenile, which makes you feel like it's lower quality to a logo that's more elevated and sophisticated, like a French patisserie, which appealed to a more affluent customer. So you can see how these different things increase the value of my product so that when you see a higher price point, you're not thinking, Oh, that's too much. You're thinking that price makes sense. Yes, there will always be people complaining about one thing or another, but they are the 1%. And it's not good business practice to change your entire business for just the 1% of people in your audience. And as I mentioned at the start of this video, I only work on this business on average 5 hours a week. How is it possible that I can make six figures with a part part part time schedule on this business? Well,I am not the only one making my products. In fact, I would say 90 to 95% of the products I sell are made by my small team of production assistants. I found them online. They work remotely from home. I train them using prerecorded videos. I send then supplies and they send me their finished charms. Then I send the charms to my shipping assistant, Daisy, and she takes care of shipping out orders. So all I do is step in to make some charms, if my team can't keep up, or some light admin work, review email campaigns, answer questions from my team, decide on next month's sales campaigns, kind of just steer the ship a little. For the most part, it runs itself. And if you're someone who is at that level in business where you're ready to start delegating because you want to grow or you can't keep up with orders and you want some mentorship around that, send me DM on Instagram @creativehiveco with the words "Shop Studio YouTube." I'm starting a new experience where I work closely with a few shop owners on how to get to that next level in their business. My goal is to help you add $10,000 to your shop every month. So if you're interested in potentially working together, send me a DM. If you're wondering how you can build your own six figure a year business, check out this video where I talk about the only four skills you need to build a $100,000 online store.