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Comment by fnordian_slip | Hacker News Reader

I like to dream about changing to a four day workweek, and dedicating one day to woodworking. Originally, I wanted to sell on Etsy, but the flood of drop shippers pretending to sell handmade stuff has put me off. It seems like it has gotten a lot worse in the last decade.

I know that this one day a week would decrease my overall earnings, but it would probably still be worth it. However, with the abundance of cheap, mass-produced items on Etsy I would have to price my items so cheap that I would fall below minimum wage on that day.

I don't want to complain, I get to do enough woodworking as is, since my employer gives me 12 additional vacation days in exchange for 5.2% of my salary, taking me up to 47 per year.

But it would still be nice if there was a platform in Europe that does what Etsy used to do.

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1. You won't regret going to a 4-day work-week even if you do nothing that makes you money with the extra time. My wife did it over a year ago and she still talks about how it's the best thing ever and can never go back. We are a bit poorer, but quality of life went like 300x for that one extra weekend day.

2. Etsy is flooded, true, but it doesn't mean people still don't find you and buy your stuff if it's good and unique (and you put effort into learning how to do Etsy SEO). If you make something that no one else has, you can charge a proper amount for it, people will buy it and leave you great reviews.

We make nearly 6 figures on Etsy as a side-business across 3 different Etsy stores for crafts/handmade/digital goods we produce. I can tell you that we used to make a lot of money with our laser-cut wood shop when it started, it was a wonderful learning experience and trip, but after 2 years or so everyone and their dog had a laser cutter, ripped off our designs, and sold them for less than half of what we did (and they weren't making any money at those rates). We had a Chinese scam ring rip off our most expensive item featuring pictures of my wife's face in them and use them as facebook ads to try and sell our $500 item for $79.99 on pop-up stores. Nothing you can do about that, but it shows that we reached a success point to be targeted like that. There are so many niches and things you can make and sell on there it still blows our mind. People sell literal PDFs of a piece of paper with an image of a piggy bank repeated like 500 times that people buy, print out, and cross out 1 by 1 as they add $10 to their vacation fund knowing that at the end they'll have finally saved the $5k they need. These stores will have like 30k+ $3.99 sales for 20 minutes of work.

It sucks that you can't report shit stores, they are frustrating, but even though they are there, the long tail is real, you can find anything from any niche, the trick is finding out what people will type in that search bar that you actually make or can make, because that will filter out most of the crap.

> 1. You won't regret going to a 4-day work-week even if you do nothing that makes you money with the extra time. My wife did it over a year ago and she still talks about how it's the best thing ever and can never go back. We are a bit poorer, but quality of life went like 300x for that one extra weekend day.

I think the huge increase in QOL is, in part, because on most weekends, 2 days is just barely enough to catch up on the shit you need to do but were deferring through the week, get things in order for the next week, take a quick breath, and then dive straight into the next work-week. It's barely even time off. It also means you can't travel anywhere (to visit family, just a short vacation, whatever) and have a whole day away that's not also a travel day, unless you leave late on Friday and aren't going far.

A three-day weekend mean you can usually get at least one actual day off most weeks, versus an average of nearly zero entire or almost-entire days off with a two-day weekend. It also opens up a ton more options for short get-aways, and leaves more room for recovery and relaxation after any activities you engage in, making the whole thing far more relaxing and cutting out some of the urgency.

Yeah, that's a big part of it! It also reduces the amount of work/BS you have to deal with each week as well, so you don't get as exhausted both mentally and physically. Going from 5/2 to 4/3 really changes the balance in work/rest to almost even in comparison. My wife noticed she never really felt like she had to take vacation days or was dying for time off the way she was before, you can actually get enough time to recharge that it's not like you are crawling to that distant finish line.

This isn't really a problem with Etsy dropshippers, handmade goods simply cannot compete with mass-produced goods as you can't scale your time. Without scale you need magnitude, people must be willing to pay you for a piece of work much more than it cost you to make it, and you must do so consistently.

My suggestion is to put a few example woodworks you've done on your spare time for sale with no expectation of making any money from them, and then offer to make custom handmade designs for people.

You can charge a lot more for those and you are basically guaranteed a sale for the time you spend on each one. The rest comes down to marketing, I have a print-on-demand shop with my own designs with 0 sales. I mostly use it as a way to leave a mark somewhere of things I've made that didn't involve coding. Burnout does that to you. Losing 20 cents for each design I make, but hey, I enjoy it.

Heh, I do this too - create stuff, put it on Etsy and watch the 0 sales just roll in.

I also see it as a way to show the world that I make stuff, dammit, and not just type code into an IDE! :)

Yes, this is a common thing to think of e-commerce sites like Etsy as a sort of social network page where you post stuff but maybe have no intention on making any sales, it’s just another way to display your hobby.

This is the reason I haven't started putting my original artwork on Etsy. I make a small amount annually with JIT art prints from Society6 and RedBubble (I used to do DeviantArt as well, but since their AI debacle, I've got a moratorium on that option). Originals cost much more than prints (my stuff is priced between 100-10,000 USD depending on size and complexity) and mostly come via work of mouth commission. I want to market, but the time commit seems onerous, and I like it not being "work" (that's what the day job is for)

You could sell your creations on Etsy. It would help to label them such that people can find your wares if one were searching for something made by hand, for instance. You can also create an external marketing site/portal that directs people to your Etsy shop.

My mother was a successful fused glass artist. Her works sold for hundreds to thousands of dollars, but in the end, she made close to minimum wage per hour, as you described. Art, or anything made by hand, doesn't scale well.

The external marketing site is probably the key, as well as making the items small enough that the profit margins don't get eaten by shipping and the cost of high quality wood.

I've started an Instagram account where I post some of my work, but I've found out that I'm really bad at social media for marketing purposes. I'm currently debating whether it's worth it to become better at marketing or SEO in order to promote my stuff, but even though it is a no-brainer from a business standpoint, it is the opposite of what I want to do.

I originally started this plan to have a workday where I don't look at the screen for 8 hours, and now I've gotten myself in a situation where I look at a screen in my free time to learn how to promote my business.

You're right, art just doesn't scale well. Maybe it's best if I continue to just do it for fun and gift it to friends and family. Not everything needs to be a business.

What's interesting about the online art world is that there are a number of platforms like Etsy that ostensibly take the sales and marketing off your plate, that said, all your points are true. They are often a race to the bottom where you feel a strong pressure to compete on pricing.

What I've seen work instead is to charge much higher rates of $1,000 or more. Think to yourself, hypothetically speaking, if I were to charge $1,000 or more for my art or my woodworking etc. what kind of items would justify that price point and then just focus on those.

Then when it comes to marketing and selling, pursue a relationship based selling approach rather than an ecommerce transactional approach.

Once you start getting social proof of happy customers you can often take the same work that was selling for $1,000 and sell it for $3,000 to $5,000 or even more.

That's the key to making a sustainable income with art or handcrafted work these days.

As someone with a similar side hustle: If you are going to drive your own traffic don't drive it to a platform thats going to take 20%+ of your gross product cost. Drive traffic to your own shopify or squarespace site that has really good ecomm built in. Get a shipstation account and you're pretty set. IMO.

My brother in law has a successful Etsy shop where he mostly sells "charcuterie boards" he makes in his home workshop as a side gig from his job as a VP of a civil engineering firm. There isn't much to them: no joinery, just a slab with a live edge. He just fills any voids or defects with epoxy, puts it through his surface sander, and applies a nice clear durable finish. Every piece is unique. He does seek out spalted and other interesting grain features to highlight. It helps that almost all of his wood is locally salvaged at almost zero expense other than his time. He loves to hunt down recently fallen trees to make a deal with the property owner to take the wood off their hands.

He gets a lot of repeat business from people like realtors who use his boards as housewarming gifts for their clients.

I work a four day workweek and have been for a full year now. I'm likely to never return to a 40hr workweek. I actually ended up interviewing at a few places a couple of months ago (Capital One, Farmers, few other smaller companies). I was pleasantly surprised by how many hiring managers and HR folks were willing to talk to me after I mentioned that I was only interested in 32hrs/wk @ 80% salary. My point of advice to anyone who is curious about a four day work week is just do it. Ask and I'm willing to bet you will receive.

Do you still get fulltime employment benefits? That seems to be the sticking point with many companies, as fulltime and parttime employees are treated, and cost, different, even if salary is prorated.

That's wild to me because it's my understanding that most HR departments consider anything over 30hrs a week to be full-time. I didn't encounter any of that last time around. My offer from Farmer's included a pension and full benefits. I'm a small sample size though...

FWIW I shop on Etsy quite a bit and I can definitely tell when something is actually handmade, and I shell out for it. I think you would still have a market despite the degradation in quality of Etsy generally.

It might be cool to include some photos and a build-log of each item being made. I think I’d like this as a shopper and it would let you distinguish your products from mass-produced stuff.

It wouldn’t have to be super-comprehensive, but I think it would be fun, especially if the reader could sorta track how the product evolves from the raw material: a knot being used as the focal point of a rustic table—-or hidden with an inlay for a fancy one, for example.

Bespoke pieces should still fetch a pretty price. It's not gonna be a good wage by any means, but it should be far above what you'd get by undercutting dropshippers.

I would focus on a more local market. Shipping real wood furniture would be an expensive hassle anyway

I made my desk out of a thick walnut slab, and it turned out great. On the woodworking FB group, people said I could sell it easily on Etsy etc for over $2K. So I looked into it. My COG was about $1k, and Etsy would take 20% of the $2K selling price, leaving me with $600 before shipping costs. Now this desk is large, weighs a lot and shipping would easily be $300-500 in the CONUS. I guess that's on the customer though. Hmm...

While noodling around with this idea I did some market research on Etsy and saw that others were selling similar desks for about $2K, with FREE shipping. I reached out to one of the sellers asking if this was real or a bait and switch. Apparently if you don't ship for free, Etsy actively discriminates against your post. So my end profit would have been between $100-$300 for a week or so of work.

Sometimes no matter how you slice it, physical goods don't make much sense. I'd have to charge at least 50% more to make it even worthwhile, and I doubt the market for $3K desks is that large.

> shippers pretending to sell handmade stuff has put me off

What does handmade mean to you? My adidas are “hand made”.

Usually it means you are buying the item from the person who made it or the store you are shopping in bought it directly from the person who made it. It's low volume production with very little or no automation involved.

Elsewhere in this thread, someone describes selling lasercut items on Etsy, which is obviously highly automated. Would you argue that shouldn't be considered handmade?

Depends on the specifics. If the service is "submit a file and I'll load it into my laser machine and mail you what comes out the other end", then probably not. That feels like getting photos printed at the CVS and nobody would say CVS sells handmade prints.

If there is a substantial amount of manual work to the piece after it comes out of the machine, then maybe. It would have to be judged on a case-by-case basis.

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