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NightShift— Review Plan & Chat is happening in 18 days
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Where I’m Actively Learning Right Now (And Why)
I spend time in a few Skool communities consistently. Not casually. Intentionally. Each one solves a different operational problem for me. And I think it’s worth saying that out loud. None of these overlap. They’re tools on different benches. Pinterest Skool This is my traffic lab. I started sharing pins in the weekly games. I started posting weekly. Then almost daily. My monthly views moved from 400 to 1.6K.Clicks to Etsy followed. Small, but real. If you want to understand Pinterest as a system instead of guessing, this is where I’m practicing. 🔗 https://www.skool.com/pinterest/about?ref=f42a2415e19c4855945f40665e943aee AI Wonderland This is strategic thinking in costume. Daily prompts. Risk assessments. Customer profiling. Corporate concepts scaled down for small builders. One prompt alone pushed me to start building an email list and a backup site in case Etsy ever fails. That’s structural thinking. It’s Alice-themed. It’s run by someone from the intelligence world.It rewards people who like thinking deeply. Not for people who hate AI or hate storytelling. 🔗 https://www.skool.com/ai101/about?ref=f42a2415e19c4855945f40665e943aee BYOB (Bring Your Own Business)Women building businesses. High energy. Real frameworks. I’ve learned how to pitch. How to build offers. How to identify what’s actually marketable in my skill set. Brand-Made exists partly because of the sharpening I got here. If you want to make money and actually enjoy business conversations, this room moves. 🔗 https://www.skool.com/byob/about?ref=f42a2415e19c4855945f40665e943aee Etsy Digital Creators HubI don’t earn commission here. I share it anyway. This is beginner-friendly Etsy digital shop building. It’s directly responsible for me launching a digital shop.Which led to wallpapers.Which led to Christian wallpapers.Which led to homeschool curriculum.
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Welcome! Introduce yourself! Lets get to know each other!
Hey, I’m Jaymie. I started my Etsy shop, Dragonswood, as a joke for a convention back in 2009. I made felt gnome hats, listed them online, and accidentally sold 200 of them in September/October. I honestly thought that was it. A fluke. A funny story I’d tell later. So I didn’t scale it. I didn’t optimize it. I didn’t “do marketing.” I just… kept the gnome hat stocked. And somehow, it kept selling at about the same rate for 15 years. The shop always had intentional vibes, but not intentional strategy. From the beginning, I ignored Etsy advice about sterile, white-background photos. I photographed everything in the forest because they were gnome hats — and it felt ridiculous to pretend otherwise. It wasn’t supposed to work anyway. It was just a hobby. Recently, I went on maternity leave and finally had the time to slow down and ask a question I’d been avoiding for years: Why is this working? That’s when I leaned in — not by stripping it down, but by giving it what it had always been hinting at. I added the whimsy it deserved, built the world I’d been quietly dreaming about, and got clear about the audience who had been finding it all along. I didn’t change the product. I shaped the story around it. After updating the shop (including SEO) in July, Dragonswood tripled its annual sales in four months. Customers didn’t just buy once — many came back two, three, sometimes four times in the same season. Reviews stopped focusing only on the hat and started talking about how magical it felt. That experience is why I’m here. Brand-Made is about designing brands people recognize and return to — even when they don’t follow the usual rules. We use tools, tactics, and formulas here — but always with intention. Always in service of the customer, not the algorithm. If you’ve ever built something that didn’t follow best practices but refused to disappear, you’re in the right place. ✨ Your turn — introduce yourself below.
Welcome! Introduce yourself! Lets get to know each other!
A messy look into the production grind
I’ve got a production period photo dump… we’ve been making new products and play testing them the last few weeks. It’s why I’ve been so quiet here. As you can see my daughter is my main play tester. This is just the beginning of the grind. We will be in full production mode in a week or two and it won’t slow down again until November. With YoY sales pushing 1500% 🤯 this quarter I’m not exactly sure what to expect from the busy quarters and the peak season this year, but I’m getting started early to head it off.
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A messy look into the production grind
Uline Day
I love it when the shipping station is fully stocked. This was my first time at the new uline facility… it is the size of a small city!!! I’m glad it’s close… shipping this would have cost me $75 and taken weeks to arrive.
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Uline Day
Sourcing Woes
Fabric sourcing is one of those quiet pressure points in a handmade business. The customer sees the finished object. The maker sees the supply chain. When a mill run changes, a store closes, or the only available bolt is three shades off, the entire production line feels it. Consistency is not vanity—it is structural. If a product line depends on color repeatability and your supply source changes every season, the system becomes fragile. That’s a shop-floor problem, not a branding problem. Brand-Made_Manifesto I ran into it today with blue felt. Same material, same weight, slightly different shade. Not catastrophic, but enough to notice if you’ve sewn hundreds of the same item. The reality is that many small makers are sourcing from hobby retail—Hobby Lobby, Michaels, Joann when it existed—and that means color runs drift. Online wholesalers help, but minimums like 25 yards don’t always make sense when you’re running multiple SKUs or testing product lines. This is where production discipline meets real-world constraints. So I’m curious how other builders here handle this. A few questions for the floor:• Do you tolerate slight color variation inside a product line, or do you break SKUs when a shade shifts?• Have you found reliable felt or fabric wholesalers that don’t require large minimums?• When a supply source disappears (like Joann), how do you rebuild consistency in your materials pipeline? The goal here isn’t perfection—it’s durable systems that keep working when suppliers change. That’s the real constraint most handmade businesses eventually face.
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