How to steal customers away from Etsy

big brands are taken over Etsy and there's nothing you can do about it should you quit should you fight should you stop moving the camera around so much Dave who do you think you are Mr Beast hi I'm Dave and this is the hungry last week I wrote an article on the hungry newsletter about an Etsy shop that has over 36 000 sales and close to if not over 700 000 worth of Revenue in the last 18 months and that's conservative numbers it's probably way more than that the story was so amazing that I decided to share it with everybody in the newsletter because I thought maybe there's some nuggets here that we can find that we can pull from and turn our own shops into a successful shop I wrote what I believe is the best article I have ever written on a particular topic like this and when I shared it with the company they said no they refused to be featured so much so that they even called the article an invasion of privacy what they didn't want me using their name talking about the owner they didn't want me sharing any images of their shop at all now for the record everything I did everything I researched was public knowledge everything was just a matter of like diving in a little bit and then pulling some information based on what was shown publicly I didn't go into some kind of Insidious ways to find dark deep information they didn't hack the system at all I just showed what was there and I talked about it but they didn't want that but that's okay because I don't really want to talk about that company today because our problem is actually way bigger than that after I got that pushback from the company I decided to talk to my friend Lizzy who has been successful on both Etsy and Amazon handmade for several years if I thought I was good at doing research there's nobody better than Lizzy because once she gets the scent of something as she goes down into a the deepest darkest Rabbit Hole you could find to pull out information when I talked to her about it I told her like there's only a couple things that I could think of that would cause a company to be this private like why would they want to make sure that nobody knew about them and the first reason was is that they're just private they're just a private company they're people they're private they don't really want to share their successes talk about it too much they just want to make stuff and move on and number two they're into some serious nefarious and after she read the article Lizzie went into full-blown Bloodhound mode and within an hour she came back with some information about stuff that I had no idea even existed but now that I think about it makes perfect sense some of the information that she found is very directly related to the company and I'm not going to share it here I just don't want to go down that road I don't want to be the guy that shares a bunch of dirty secrets on a company there was one thing she found on Reddit that was enlightening to me and it's not related to this particular company but related to the bigger symptom the bigger problem so to speak of what's happening on Etsy go to the Etsy sellers subreddit and you look up large companies posing a small business you'll find this article I'll put it in the link in the description but you'll see what I'm talking about the original poster basically says that they've been busting their butts trying to compete with a whole bunch of new companies that have taken over Etsy over the year only to find out that these are super large companies making several Etsy shops pretending to be small business you go through the comments you'll see other people sharing similar stories like I know literal wholesale factories have started Etsy shops recently selling at bulk discount pricing a massive influx of drop shippers comment was interesting it says my favorite part is it's one of these mom and pop shops family-owned businesses contacted us asking if we would be interested in acquisition which is why didn't we dug and found out that they're a much larger company have you ever gone to Target or Old Navy or some department store like that where they have like a whole bunch of different shirts that look trendy and cool and some of them might be licensed to some particular brand but most of them are just like you know they're just trendy they're just like trying to hop on whatever trying to get a little bit of money out of that they always have somebody within the company that's in their merchandise department and says hey we need to hop on this trend and so they'll get a bunch of shirts made but Target and Old Navy don't make the shirts themselves they actually push that out to another company that does all that work for them these smaller print companies will have a whole Warehouse filled with all different types of printers they'll have an in-house design team to design all of these things for all these larger companies but not all of the designs that they make get bought up by the larger company so what if one of these companies decided to sell all of the designs that Target and Old Navy didn't choose use they already have the designs why not sell them somewhere else the marketplace like Etsy or Amazon handmade is a perfect place to spin off a particular set of designs and sell them that way because the bigger company isn't paying attention to that stuff and Amazon and Etsy aren't going to do their due diligence to find out if there's a non-compete or not all it would take for them would be to come up with a big new fictitious business name maybe spin off a new LLC just so they have some sort of separation between them and it and then boom you're a new handmade company on Etsy selling shirt designs with a gigantic manufacturing business behind now you may be thinking to yourself that's not fair who's going to stop them it would be difficult if not impossible to prove and Etsy isn't going to stop them especially if that brand is bringing in tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousand dollars worth of Revenue Etsy May perpetrate that they are in the handmade business but they left those roots back a long time so if it's not fair and there's nothing you could do about those companies well how do you even compete the reality is you don't you just don't have the resources at least not at scale but you can use their same game plan now you know that massive success is possible on Etsy because if these

companies can do it well then it's possible for other companies to do it well you may take longer to get there but it is possible go to Google and search up best Etsy sellers 2023. you're going to see a laundry list of companies that are absolutely killing it some of those are going to be the types of brands that we're talking about today and some of them are going to be companies that have come up over a very long period of time you go down deeper into the list of all these companies you find the ones that are a little bit closer to you and you figure out what it is that they are doing when you see a shop that's killing it you go in and you figure out like how do I reverse engineer what's happening right here like what is it about this place that makes people want to keep coming to buy from them it's going to take a little bit of research but luckily for you I've been doing that kind of research for you on all these different types of brands for a little bit now I'm going to share with you five ways that you can start playing on their field number one is high quality work this is subjective because we don't really know what's quality and what's not just based on whatever it is that we see in the shop they may showcase really well but you don't really know the quality that you're getting into until you actually have it in your hands but high quality work is just as much about what you're portraying on there as it is what you're actually producing so when you see a shop that looks cohesive the designs are all similar or related or they all feel like they came from the same group the same person when all of the images look the same models mock-ups look relatively similar when everything seems to have the same fit and finish throughout that's when you know you're doing high quality work number two is Brandy and that branding starts with the name plates up at the top the Banners at the top of your shop the logo wherever it is that you decide to show up on a social media any of these other places the way that people perceive that brand is going to be based on whatever it is you're showing and even the mock-up images when you have a mock-up image it looks like you go into an Etsy listing and there's multiple images to filter through to see what the product looks like and then towards the end there's other images in there that kind of branded to make people understand more information it's not random it's not all these different colors typefaces there's a fit and finish again to everything and that goes beyond the walls of that shot number three because that's social media because you obviously want to show up on social media the same way you do on the shop it's not just about taking some of those pictures from your shop and just putting it up on your Instagram it's about showing up in a way that's authentic to you as the maker and finding people that are aligned with that or maybe it's going into other accounts that of people that like what you like and then going in and engaging those people as if you have the intention of potentially bringing in new customers I mean you don't want to go in and be salesy like hey I make good stuff you should come over see my shop you engage authentically you bring them into the fold hopefully they go over they find your Instagram account which is obviously going to have a link if you only have an Etsy shop then okay it brings you back to the Etsy shop but maybe it goes back to your actual web shop or wherever it is you want to send them but you maintain that continuity within your social media so that you can keep bringing people in keep bringing them in number four is newsletter if you don't have a newsletter then what are you doing it's 2023 and if you're not using a newsletter for your business you are failing I know that sounds harsh and I know you're thinking to yourself like I don't want to write a newsletter I do so much already if you were to stop operating on one social media Outlet I don't care which one whatever one that isn't doing you so good that doesn't bring in sales if you were to stop doing that just focus on your newsletter instead you'll probably do better because the one thing that most people miss about working on a Marketplace like Etsy is that Rando comes in and buys from you then they go and they check out you're never gonna see them again there's no way to get them back so now you have to constantly look for the next person to come in and they're going to leave and the next person but instead if you were trying to do things to bring people back then go to your social media so that you have a link to your newsletter or make them go to your newsletter directly through your shop but you have that newsletter there so that you can continually go back to communicate to them often regularly anytime you want as opposed to what Etsy does which means you can't talk to them hardly like this why do you think their communication tool is so bad they don't want you talking to their customers and finally number five advertising and I know that a lot of people would be like Etsy advertising suck okay well don't do Etsy ads start posting ads in places where people might actually find you it might actually be interesting you and not just like randomly find you because they happen to be looking for Halloween shirt or girl boss shirt bonus strategy subscribe to the hungry newsletter because I talk about stuff like this all the time and I give it away for free now that list may be daunting but we're not here to do them all not saying hey go change everything about your shop in one day you take one you break it down you figure it out you learn more about it and then you execute on whatever it is that you've learned and that's where just in time learning comes in pick a thing spend a few hours or more learning how to do that thing and then take action on the things that you learn coincidentally I happen to be on skillshare the other day because I was doing some research on another deep dive that I would be writing about very soon on a topic that I think a lot of people are going to appreciate but when I was there I can confidently say without any

doubt whatsoever that there are plenty of courses on skillshare for the things that we just talked about here's one on illustration this one here is on branding social media newsletters and advertising full disclosure I have a couple courses on skillshare not on these particular topics yet and I'm also an affiliate which means if you click that link in the description not only will you be getting one month free to squeeze in as many courses as you can possibly get into that brain of yours you'll also be supporting this channel as I glazed over this information quite a bit which I plan on expanding on in the future probably individual topics all the time but if you have any questions about that please feel free to go down to the comments and ask me all the questions you want I'm happy to answer as many as I possibly can finally it's important to understand that this is not just Etsy it's on Amazon it's on Sachi it's on Society6 it's on Redbubble and if you want to know more about what I think people should do in those circumstances then you're going to want to watch that video right there thanks very much folks I really appreciate you watching I've been Dave you've been awesome and I will see you next time