Wouldn’t it be wonderful to turn your hobby into a job and spend all day doing something that you really enjoy?
Etsy.com, a website where home-based handcrafters from around the world can sell their wares, has provided a platform for many artisans to move beyond pleasant pastime and straight into a lucrative living. Clark County residents Jenefer Ham, Melissa Jackson and Nataliya Nesmiyanova are among the 28 percent of Etsy sellers whose shops aren’t a hobby or side hustle but their full-time jobs.
The fact that all three are women is not surprising. According to Etsy, 82 percent of its U.S. sellers are women. Many of those who joined Etsy in the past year did so because of the pandemic and financial stress, according to the company.
“I moved here four years ago, so I don’t have a big network of galleries or anything where I could sell my work. Even if I had, those places were closed because of COVID. Etsy has allowed me to keep selling,” said Ham, 52, the artist behind Etsy store JeneferHamGlass, offering glass jewelry and playing pieces for board games.
Ham started making glass art in her 20s. At the time, she was working as a graphic designer in Austin, Texas. A friend who had a portable kiln suggested glass fusing as a girls’ night out activity.
“She said, ‘You get a couple girls together and I’ll bring my kiln and we’ll melt some glass’ and I was like, ‘You don’t have to ask me twice,’ ” Ham said.
When Ham and her husband, Richard, moved to Guildford, England, in 2004, she sold her graphic design business and became a full-time glass artist. She joined local artists’ guilds, selling her work at galleries and artisan markets, eventually becoming chair of the Surrey Guild of Craftsmen.
In 2012, Richard, a video game designer, was hired by a Maltese company. Ham said she didn’t want to lug her heavy kiln and sheet glass to Malta, so traded them for a torch and glass rods. She enjoyed the immediacy of lampworking, a glass art form that “needs 100 percent of your attention because you’ve got molten glass in the vicinity of your body.” She sold her work through local shops and galleries but opened an Etsy store in 2013 so that she could sell to far-flung clientele.
Four years ago, when Ham and her husband moved to Clark County, she kept selling on Etsy. Richard started his own YouTube channel, Rahdo Runs Through, where he plays board games for his 104,000 subscribers. The two passions overlapped when Richard featured some of his wife’s custom glasswork playing pieces and viewers wanted their own.
“I like the color purple and, a lot of times, games don’t have a purple marker,” Ham said. “So people would see them on his game run-throughs and ask to buy them.”
Now, she said, about 60 percent of her work is game pieces and the rest is jewelry or tiny figurines. She makes a lot of “meeples,” or chunky person-shaped playing pieces, she said. “Googlies,” which she describes as “little pyramid-shaped glass nugget things that have eye blobs on them,” are also popular, she said.
She takes plenty of orders from gamers requesting custom playing pieces. She’s aware that her business is bustling, at least in part, because of her husband’s fame in the gaming world, but appreciates the lucky happenstance.
“Fortunately, my husband has a lot of YouTube subscribers,” said Ham, who also sells her work at gaming conventions. “I feel very grateful for everything that I have and our ability to just keep going along, in spite of COVID.”
As Ham can attest, success with Etsy requires selling far beyond your circle of acquaintances. Ham relies on several social media platforms besides YouTube to help get the word out. Customers can also find Ham’s handiwork on Instagram, Facebook and her website, www.jenefer.net.
Influencer spotlight
Instagram, a photo-sharing website, has been a particular boon for Etsy artisans like Salmon Creek resident Melissa Jackson, 41, owner of the Etsy store HoneyBeeCuriosity. When Jackson opened her store in 2020, she posted pictures of her miniature polymer clay food on her Instagram page, @a_novel_mini. Jackson’s sales skyrocketed when she was discovered by an Instagram influencer with thousands of followers.
“Somebody found me who’s very influential in the miniature world,” Jackson said. “She liked some of the food I’d been making, so she showcased some of my items on her page. She bought a set of miniature Froot Loops in bowls. Then I started getting more customers and more followers and it’s just been crazy ever since.”
Jackson’s wee foods are incredibly realistic and, if you didn’t know they were at 1:12 scale (sized for a standard dollhouse), you’d want to take a bite. She also makes a huge variety of brand-name packaged food, although she said Etsy is about to change its rules on this count. For now, customers can buy tiny Burger King burgers, Cinnabon cinnamon rolls or even a package of Peeps.
Jackson discovered her passion just before the pandemic started. She’d been working at PeaceHealth Southwest Washington Medical Center, first restocking inventory and then as a certified hospital tech. During a moment of downtime, she scrolled through YouTube and saw videos of people creating tiny food.
“I thought, ‘Oh, that’s kind of cool and I don’t really have a hobby,’ so I went to the craft store and got some stuff,” Jackson said. “It was a spur-of-the-moment decision.”
She made teensy fried eggs and was hooked. She saw other miniature sellers on Etsy and thought she could do just as well, so she opened her own Etsy store to sell miniature food jewelry. Business was slow at first and she didn’t sell anything for several weeks. Finally, a buyer purchased a slice of pizza on a plate for her dollhouse.
Jackson didn’t quit her job after one sale, however. She adjusted her focus from jewelry to dollhouse food. She tinkered with techniques and challenged herself with custom requests while pulling day and night shifts and “spending every extra minute on my business.”
When sales were steady enough, Jackson quit. Now she works 12 to 14 hours a day on her Etsy store. She handcrafts every single piece of food, from English muffins to vegetable platters with celery and radishes. Her list of customer requests is “booked out about six months.” She estimates she makes at least 1,000 items per month and earns triple her former income.
Patience is key, Jackson said, as is paying attention to trends and using every available means to advertise. That way, if you get a lucky break, you’ll be ready for it.
Hard work, long hours
Or perhaps patience, tenacity and optimism create their own kind of luck, as they did for Nataliya Nesmiyanova, owner of LeDahlia, the Etsy store where Nesmiyanova sells her crocheted toys.
“Don’t give up and be discouraged when it seems to start out slow,” Nesmiyanova said. “Keep making beautiful products and you’ll be noticed when the time is right.”
Nesmiyanova’s aunt taught her to crochet when she was 8 years old in her native Ukraine. After emigrating to the United States at age 13, she kept up her relaxing hobby, making mostly doilies until she was 30 and her cousin, a new mother, asked for a baby toy. Nesmiyanova enjoyed the process so much that she forgot about doilies and started making bunnies.
A year later, at the suggestion of her sister, Nesmiyanova launched her Etsy store. She started out small and simple, selling only bunnies at first and then adding teddy bears. Soon she was accepting requests for other cute critters.
“It was almost like my clients were encouraging me to do something different all the time, challenging me,” Nesmiyanova said. “I would go further and further, trying new animals.”
She kept her full-time job as a pharmacist until she had enough orders to cut back her hours. Three months ago, she said, she left her pharmacy position altogether to focus exclusively on Etsy.
“Letting go of my main job had been brewing in my mind for a while,” Nesmiyanova said. “I’ve always dreamed about being a painter, a designer or a sewer, a creative maker of some sort. The pharmacy seemed to be just in the way and taking time away from actually doing what makes me so happy.”
Nesmiyanova said she puts in the same hours as she would for a full-time job. Each animal takes about five hours from start to finish and she averages about 30 orders per month. That can rise to 45 during the holidays, she said.
She currently has about 80 items for sale in her Etsy store, a regular menagerie of woodland creatures (foxes are top sellers, she said) as well as lambs, dogs, cats, swans, lions, whales, fish and even honeybees. She said she still relishes the custom orders because each one is “something new, something exciting.”
The majority of Nesmiyanova’s clients are new mothers or grandmothers looking for gifts. Like Jackson and Ham, Nesmiyanova’s Etsy shop gets a boost from her Instagram page, @le_dahlia. Nesmiyanova especially loves it when customers tag LeDahlia in their Instagram posts, showing babies holding her handmade toys. It’s a sweet reminder of Nesmiyanova’s own hopes for her future.
“It’s a dream of mine to have a baby of my own,” Nesmiyanova said. “Maybe it’s not my time yet, but this way I seem to be close to it. I’m making people happy.”
