Thrifted VS Handmade
- Joyfully Embroidery
- Apr 9
- 2 min read
Every holiday brings on new trends and ideas, this Easter something that caught my attention was Easter Basket Tags. I had faux leather scraps laying around that would work perfect for this. I designed a simple embroidery file to use to make them. It tripled as decorative, personalizable and it combined 2 pieces of faux leather together to make it more sturdy. Of course I did this all a couple weeks before Easter (which in the maker world is extremely late) so guess how much I sold? If you guessed 0 that is correct, which is fine because I did use them for my daughter and husbands Easter baskets. I also was able to add the embroidery file to my shop and maybe the physical listing will get some traction next year. Something they don’t tell you about when you start your business is that most products don’t sell. Most profits come from just a handful of products which is why it’s important to like what you do because you can’t let that stop you from creating. Speaking of creating if you’d like to make your own easter tags I’ll link everything I used to make them after this paragraph. Like the physical tags I made, I am also posting this late so the chances that you will are slim, lol.
Now that you have the backstory this brings me to the entire point of this article which is how do you market new products when there is an elephant in the room, and her name is “thrifting”? I think most makers and business owners who are in the zeitgeist are facing this same challenge. That challenge being that you are trying to sell new products to people who are increasingly thrifting their products. Which is a good thing if you have a soul. Now there are many ways to incorporate sustainability into your business, but that’s for another article. I believe you can still exist in a thrifting world with sustainable practices and high quality products that will last generations to come. This is how I wanted to market my Easter tags. I want them to be around a long time, I want them to be part of a family’s Easter basket tradition.
The easiest way to show a family how this could fit into their eco-friendly lifestyle is to show them so that’s what I did. I decided to make an all thrifted Easter basket. I filmed a haul featuring everything I put into the basket and added the Easter tag at the end. This way you can keep up the shopping practices that you value and a little handmade magic could be the cherry on top.
