I bought my first Cricut in late 2018, just before Christmas. I had seen them on YouTube and knew a couple of people who had them and I thought it seemed like a great machine. So I got one.
The day Amazon delivered it, I set it up and began making my daughter, Bella, lots of shirts to wear everywhere we went. When her birthday rolled around I made all of her cupcake toppers, party decorations, and even the outfit she wore! After that, a friend of my mom’s asked me to make cupcake toppers for a baby shower she was doing at work. She offered to pay me for them…. And so I had my first official paid job making party decorations.
From there, I received a few more requests for cupcake toppers of various types and started thinking that maybe there were more people who might want handmade cupcake toppers. So I decided to start an Etsy shop. In March 2019, I opened my Etsy shop and made a personal goal to keep it open for a year even if I never made a sale!!!
I started the shop selling cupcake toppers - printed ones only - and shirts with iron on vinyl words and images on them.
It turns out lots of people were interested in cupcake toppers! I made it to around 700 sales in my first year! And my product offerings continued to grow and change.
It is so hard to believe in 5 years, my little business has had close to 30,000 sales I am now starting a new chapter by moving to my own website! What exciting possibilities for what started out as just something to do for fun!
