Reviving the Etsy Shop
The P.S. Club is no more. That was a hard one for me to part with, I won’t lie. But here is how it all went down…
Creating for FUN
Our P.S. Club always included seasonal printables, such as the ones above. Now you’ll find seasonal items and so much more in the Etsy shop that are ready to print or edit.
I’ve had a love for designing for over 15 years. I recently said if I could go back in time I would have actually majored in Graphic Design in college instead of Public Relations and Marketing. While I got some design experience in my major, I know I was just scratching the surface. So as the years passed after college and I continued to design, I taught myself almost everything I knew in the Adobe Design suite. Learning things in Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign while you’re in the throws of a project isn’t for the faint of heart, but it also isn’t impossible when you have a Google search bar and a desire to create pretty things. However, I was finding myself in more of a place of creating for OTHERS through wedding stationery and party invitations and less of just creating for fun. So I started the P.S. Club as a way to make fun new designs every month that just sparked joy - things that moms or teachers or go-getter dads could download and use with their kiddos. But there was a problem.
The Technical Stuff
If you know much about website backends (another fun thing I’ve learned on the fly as I’ve built a business), you would know that every website platform can charge a thousand little fees for a thousand little things. One of those things that our website charges for is a “Members” area, which is what I was using to create the P.S. Club. This was designed so that only paying members would have access to the content. Here is where the problem came into play.
The Etsy store now has digital downloads (that you can just simply download and print) OR links to templates for things like invitations that you can DIY in Canva.
In order to pay for a Members only area, you need Members. And to pull back the curtain on this project, there just weren’t any. Now, that’s not to say that there were none - because there were about a dozen or so, but certainly not enough to continue to justify additional expenditures, time, etc. So, I decided to pivot, and do something I wasn’t sure would really work, but thought it was worth a shot.
Pivoting with Canva
The online design platform, Canva, has been on the scene for over ten years. Truth be told, I didn’t even know that. I am a newer to regular Canva use - I’d dabbled in the past but had always gone back to my tried and true Adobe products for creating nearly everything I’ve ever sold. Well, I decided if I was going to just design for fun, I was going to use Canva - simply because it’s an easy software (and I can even do it from my phone). So I thought I’d put a spin on my digital download, P.S. Club products, and move them all to Etsy. It’s a thought I’ve had for awhile, but I wasn’t sure how to execute it. So I started researching a lot, and learned a lot, and I discovered that possibly creating TEMPLATES, in addition to digital downloads that customers could just print, might just be the way to go.
The Cliff Notes, but thanks for reading this far!
To make this long story short, I’m back on Etsy. I have always had a love/hate relationship with this platform, but the more I learn about it, the more I research, the more people I’m discovering that I can reach. That was the problem with the P.S. Club. No matter how much I advertised, no matter how many emails I sent or Instagram posts I made, I just wasn’t reaching the audience that I needed to with the content. Since switching the digital products and templates from my P.S. Club structure to Etsy I’ve practically doubled the traffic. I’m looking forward to continuing the experiment over there, and simply just continuing to design because it’s FUN and seeing what people like to purchase!
Click on this image to grab this invitation and start editing it TODAY!