OMG – Woman Makes Almost $1 Million A Year On Etsy

Charles Lenoir / September 24, 2015

How can anyone make almost one million dollars from selling handmade socks and scarves???

Well…

Ask Alicia Shaffer

Alicia Shaffer is a married of mother-of-three and lives in Livermore, California.

Shaffer is the founder of Three Birds Nest Designs, online retail business that sells handmade accessories for women.

She earns $65,000 a month from selling handmade headbands, socks and scarves on Etsy.

She is the one of the most successful sellers on Etsy, an online marketplace.

She has no background in fashion but has worked with leather for years.

Three Birds Nest Design is Shaffer’s third business. Her first business was a baby product line and the second was a brick-and-mortar store — both ended and she and her family found themselves in debt.

In the beginning, this was out of necessity, I needed to make money to pay for financial loss that we had had, I didn’t want to lose our house, and I have three kids I needed to provide for.” Says Alicia Shaffer

Shaffer’s entrepreneurial spirit led her to Etsy and says she saw it as a chance to try again, and not make the same mistakes she made in her other businesses.

According to Wikipedia,

Etsy is a peer-to-peer e-commerce website focused on handmade or vintage items and supplies, as well as unique factory-manufactured items.”

Etsy has over 30 million registered users, one million sellers and over one billion in total annual transactions thus far.

Shaffer originally just wanted to bring in some extra money to help out and started selling boho-inspired hats and scarves through her online shop, ThreeBirdNest.

But in the first few weeks after its December launch, ThreeBirdNest made 90 sales. Shaffer credits much of the traffic to Pinterest—she pinned her items.

Still,it was absolutely mind boggling. I thought it was a complete fluke, that it would stop after the holidays were over.” says Alicia Shaffer

Shaffer told Business Insider,

I would have been thrilled to make $100 to $200 a month to pay for my daughter’s dance lessons….

I was really just trying to make a couple sales a week because I had lost confidence in my ability to start a business.”

Now through its independent website and Etsy shop, ThreeBirdNest receives an average of 150 orders per day, with most orders consisting of three items. Around the holidays, that number goes up to 700 to 1,200 orders per day. In January of 2015, the business raked in a total of $128,000 in sales. In the three years since its launch, it has made 100,000 sales on Etsy alone.

Shaffer believes that to be successful one must ‘eat, sleep and breathe’ their brand, and says she keeps going because of the love and passion her customers have for her items. Alicia’s business has skyrocketed to success to the point that her husband retired early from his job as a fire chief to help run the house, she told Yahoo.