I Launched my Etsy Shop! | OpeninG Leah Carolyn Designs

Leah Carolyn Designs is officially up and running on Etsy! I have been talking about opening my own Etsy shop for a while now, but I could never really nail down what I wanted to sell and I was nervous that it just wouldn’t work out. I finally pulled the trigger and opened my very own shop, where I sell personalized apparel and accessories.

It’s honestly a little scary starting something new like this. You worry about not making sales, making sure you have everything you need to start, all of the legal and tax set up and on top of all that you have to make sure your brand will bring people in. I did tons of research on setting up an online business in my state and let me tell you it was not easy. After a while though I got everything together that I needed, filled all the paperwork and opened up a bank account just for the shop (which I highly recommend even if you’re just starting out). 

If you’re going to invest in anything when you first start out I highly recommend a designer to help you with your brand. It’s the first thing people judge your business off of so you want to make sure that it represents you well. Graphic design/branding is not my strong suit but I have been following Adrienne from Adrienne James Creative for years so I knew that when I had to create the Leah Carolyn Designs brand she would be the perfect person to help. She designed the super cute logos that you see across my socials and the shop for me and is the sweetest person to work with. She really helped give direction to all the ideas that I had in my head to nail down something that feels very me for my brand.

When it came to stocking the shop I didn’t want to have a ton of products made and end up not selling them, so I started with three designs that  I knew I’d use myself. However, just last weekend I did add to my original line up. For right now I’m doing things made to order. Hopefully one day I can get to the point where I can start out with a certain amount of inventory for a launch but right now I am sticking with a single item to model and relying on mockups for any other designs. It’s super easy to make your own mock up blank. You just need to get a styled photo in good natural light of one of your blanks, then you can photoshop anything onto it that has a transparent background.

I am so excited to see what is in store for Leah Carolyn Designs and would love for it to grow with all of my readers. For right now my plans are to have a new product release each Saturday (which get announced on the shop Instagram) , so if there is anything that you want to see leave me a comment or shoot me an email. I will also be taking custom design requests, although many of my designs are already customizable.