Are you struggling to take your shop to that next level? Do you feel like you’re endlessly searching Google for answers to questions about selling on Etsy? Well, stick around because in this episode, we’re talking to Jenni from Fuzzy & Birch. She covers some struggles Etsy sellers are facing and talks about how her course has helped one-sixth of her students make the move to full-time Etsy sellers!
Let us introduce you…
Today we have Jenni Waldrop joining us from Fuzzy & Birch and Birch, Please! She’s been with us before, and we’re excited to have her back. Jenni has a course releasing soon, so we want to talk about what that’s all about!
We also want to chat about the platforms that she’s got going on and how they can help sellers overcome their Etsy struggles and help online sellers in general. Before we get into things too much, it’s been a while since we’ve chatted, so we want to give you an overview of how Jenni got started and how she grew into the space that she’s in now.
Jenni’s Backstory
Jenni was trapped in your classic, horrible job. She worked remotely for Silicon Valley as (what she would phrase) a slightly underpaid woman. Jenni was in a very technical field, filled with men and very demanding hours, along with bosses that didn’t really know what they were doing but would tell you what to do anyway!
She says, however, she’s in no way throwing shade on Silicon Valley. Jenni also worked with some of the smartest, most amazing people in her life! But her day-to-day experience, unfortunately, was not super.
Getting Started on Etsy
She started selling on Etsy just to get some extra money. She thought that two or three thousand a month would change her life. Then, she thought that maybe in a year, she’d be able to make an amount that would allow her to walk away from her job for a couple of months. She wanted to figure her life out.
Beating the Odds
Six months later, she was beating her monthly income from that same day job. No one was more surprised than Jenni herself! She says she hadn’t known what she was doing when she started. The only experience she had working at her day job was SEO-related experience.
She had no design experience, as she wasn’t a graphic designer. She’d never designed a product in her life! And yet, here she was selling products and designing products. She was being termed a “professional artist,” which she felt was laughable since she says she failed art in high school 😂
A Life-Changing Decision
She says she decided that it was time to leave her corporate job and try and figure the Etsy thing out for herself. She was ready to learn more of the things that she didn’t have time to do because she was still working her day job.
An Explosion 💥
Her Etsy shop exploded from that point forward! Not only did it grow like crazy, but it turned into multiple other shops that were Amazon shops, Not On High Street shops, all kinds of things that funded her. This allowed her to never have to work for somebody else again. Then, (about a year in) she noticed everyone was asking her how she’d done this?
Becoming A Coach to Help Others with Their Etsy Struggles
With more folks asking how she’d found this level of success and wanting to try it for themselves, Jenni started writing her blog, and the blog turned out to be really fun! She got to share her experiences and talk to other people who had the same problems she had.
At this point, people were still amazed that you could work on the internet, so Jenni says it was awesome and crazy to be able to exchange stories. She loved talking with other people and sharing what had happened to her. Being able to say, “Hey, I did this, and it worked. Then, I did it again and it worked again. So, try it,” was unbelievable. The experience that Jenni had is what she wishes more people could have. She wants to help other sellers find exactly this success in their own experience and overcome their Etsy struggles!
Being Brave and Leaving Your Comfort Zone
The last time we talked to Jenni, she was just transitioning into more of the coaching space, coming from a seller space. Now, looking back, she says she can’t believe how bold she was at that time to even reach out and ask to be on The Jam. In retrospect, she says it was really brave of her because she now wonders what she thought she had going for her at the time that could have gotten her on the podcast (we disagree, we’ve always thought she was amazing!)
Being brave and getting outside of your comfort zone is something she hopes other people take away from her story. Jenni wants to encourage everyone to do things that they don’t think are going to work out! She finds that the more she pushes herself out of her comfort zone, the bigger things become for her in the best possible way!
Not Being Ready and Doing It Anyways
Jenni says that sometimes it’s overwhelming because you’re not ready for a big change. She doesn’t know if you’re ever ready! She says she wasn’t ready for her business to do as well as it did at any point. Even when she built it up to do better, she still wasn’t ready for it to do better. From that perspective, it makes sense to just take your brain out of the equation and be like, “Hey, let’s just try one thing that I’m really uncomfortable with.”
She tries to do this once a month because that’s about what she can handle. Jenni does say that it’s fun to do this! Some of the things she tries, she fails, and that’s OK! But circling back around to when she was first on our podcast, she says this was one thing that was out of her comfort zone. It really helped her get going and get in touch with more of the Etsy community.
Fuzzy & Birch and Birch, Please!
We asked Jenni to tell us more about Fuzzy & Birch and the new blog that she has out now, Birch, Please! Fuzzy & Birch was originally the name of Jenni’s Etsy shop. Obviously, she trademarked it so she could use it for the blog. This was originally where everything was stored. All of her programs, all of her free resources, all her blog stuff. She wanted to put everything in a place where people could find it a little easier.
What You’ll Find There to Help with Your Etsy Struggles
It’s basically a blog that is all her Etsy content in one place. You can figure out what you need by topic. For example, if you’re looking for tools, that’s one of her most popular things. If you’re looking for trends, if you just want to work on SEO, or just want to get more sales, those are all topics you can dive into.
She wanted to create a media channel where everything was stored and easy to sort through, and there’s mostly free stuff. Eighty-five percent of this stuff is completely free, no email address needed, no nothing. And then there is some stuff you can get for free when you put in your email address, like free courses that take you step-by-step through how to accomplish what she recommends. There’s also some paid content for people ready to move up and accomplish specific things in a specific way.
Her Upcoming Course
Jenni’s Power Seller program is launching on Monday, March 22nd. Jenni is excited about this course because, as an Etsy seller who was doing really well, she was having a tough time finding information that could help her continue to grow. At the time, she was selling very, very actively. But when she was in Etsy groups online, she found that people were asking questions about their Etsy struggles that they could have simply Googled.
Where was the more advanced information she was looking for? The information that would help someone like her, who was really trying to grow in a big way. She wanted her Etsy shop to be her only job. She wanted it to be huge and explode! But she does understand that this isn’t what every Etsy seller wants. For the people who did want this outcome at that time, there wasn’t much information out there.
Asking the Right Questions
So, Jenni talked to some top sellers. She asked things like, what would you like? What is it out there for you? What are you missing day-to-day? She realized a lot of what they wanted was just weekly coaching. She put sellers into little groups of four to five people, matched with struggles similar to theirs.
The shops might not be the same, but the level and what they were trying to achieve were similar. They ended up making close business friends, which Jenni has found to be hard to do. For Jenni, she’s felt like if she doesn’t attend multiple conferences a year, she won’t make strong friendships.
Some Great Results
Jenni says, so far, this program has been amazing! She had thirty people in the last round, and five have already gone on to quit their job in only five months. This is exciting! People participating in Jenni’s course are getting weekly feedback from a coach. They have a little text group, so when they have problems in the dead of night (or for the times when they’re just freaking out because it’s hard to do this and there’s no magic button you can push), they have support 🔗
She has sellers who have their kids at home. They’re teaching their kids school, their partner is going to work all day. What are they supposed to do? How are they supposed to run an Etsy shop?
Problem Solving Different Etsy Struggles
These are the sort of problems that Jenni’s course is helping people to surmount. This is all in addition to problems like doubling or tripling their sales. Not just increasing by five hundred dollars a month, but how to earn two-thousand or ten-thousand more dollars a month.
What are they not doing? What are they missing, or what are they blocked on? Jenni says that, interestingly enough, sellers are usually blocked even when they have everything they need to reach their goals.
Getting Beyond What’s Blocking You
When you already have everything you need to do what you want, but you’re blocking yourself, how do we become unblocked? It can be hard to overcome this Etsy struggle and do that for yourself. That’s a lot of what this program really winds up doing for most sellers. It helps them figure out what those blocks are, how to remove them, and then help that person create what they wanted all along.
The Importance of Connection
Jenni also says that one of the many Etsy struggles that sellers face is that they’re often closed off. She understands this because, as a business owner, you must protect yourself. But at the same time, sometimes you just want to talk to somebody. This is one reason why she often matches people up with slightly different sellers than them, especially if they request it.
She says, obviously, she doesn’t need them giving away things that they feel are trade secrets, but she does think that Etsy sellers can help each other. Day-to-day, their jobs are similar. Jenni believes it is so valuable to have that input from other sellers. She can’t even communicate how much her business grew when she started talking to other people and stopped feeling obligated to do it all herself.
All the Details & Marmalead
If you pay for a year of coaching (which she says is intense, but she loves a full year’s worth of coaching because of the huge changes her clients see in short periods), she includes a year of Marmalead completely free. She’s doing this because, for her, her first five hundred sales came exclusively from Marmalead. She didn’t do anything else. When she started, she didn’t know how to market. She wasn’t even sure how to take good pictures. And yet, her first five hundred sales came from Marmalead.
SEO Tools and How They Help You Get Past Your Etsy Struggles
When she first started out in her Etsy shop, Jenny was an SEO expert in her industry. Even then, she knew you don’t just come up with words. You use a tool. Something else needs to do that work for you. You need data.
That’s why she includes Marmalead in her course. Many of the sellers working with her use Marmalead in so many ingenious ways and teach other sellers how to use it similarly. They’re doing this in terms of producing very specific and very trendy products to sell.
A Great Example to Overcome Etsy Struggles
There’s a great example of the keynote product, which she explains to her sellers as the one product in their shop that’s so popular that it combines trends and drives traffic to the rest of their shop. She sees this phenomenon all the time; it will elevate a shop very quickly! She often encourages her power seller members to create these keynote items, and she says Marmalead makes that process a piece of cake!
Instead of doing hours of research, searching Amazon, searching Pinterest, searching Google, and amalgamating all of that, you can do this with Marmalead really quickly. That’s why she wanted to include a years’ worth of Marmalead. As sellers learn to manipulate their store in new ways over the Power Seller coaching course, Jenni says Marmalead is the perfect tool to make that happen faster.
Light & Polite Look into Etsy Struggles
Jenni does something that she calls “light and polite seller stalking” in her group. This is basically when you go down the rabbit hole of all the links somebody has on their Etsy page and see what you can find out about their Etsy struggles. It’s light and polite because she won’t go into personal accounts. She is only looking at business accounts. She does this with her sellers sometimes because they might say something like, “This person is making three times more sales than me, and we are very comparable. I don’t understand what they’re doing that I’m not.”
Jenni often finds that it has nothing to do with the product or the SEO. She has a podcast coming out where she goes down the rabbit hole with someone. She found out that this seller showed people how to make her product on TikTok, and her TikTok had exploded!
The seller who was comparing herself never would have figured that out, just from looking at this other seller’s Etsy page. She just would have thought that she wasn’t doing enough.
Final Thoughts to Overcome Etsy Struggles
As always, it’s awesome to talk with Jenni! If you haven’t checked out Jenny’s stuff yet, be sure to do that! Check out Birch, Please! and her podcast! If you’re interested in taking her Power Seller coaching program, add your name to the waitlist now!
Happy selling, everyone! 😁
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