Fire in the Hole! Handcrafted Drumsticks Ignite Into Profits

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Oh my gosh, I am learning so much through making this show. Two weeks ago, I learned how auctions work, like actual auctions, not online auctions, but the art of auctioneering. And then also how people can get paid for hunting down computer bugs and vulnerabilities. If you missed those episodes, they were number 765 and 766. Those are just a couple of examples.

It's basically like a free education, making this show. And I hope you enjoy learning as well. For all of our younger listeners out there, kids, if you're listening right now, just go ahead and drop out of school. Everything you need to know is in this daily 10-minute episode. Tell your parents I said it was okay.

And today, at least some of us will learn for the first time about pyrography. And some of our listeners out there, of course, probably already know what that is, but I will be honest and raise my hand and say, I did not. I did not know what pyrography was, but I did know that the word pyro relates to fire. And the word graffiti, which is not actually a word. It's more like an extension, but it refers to a descriptive science like writing, drawing, or otherwise recording.

So you put these things together. And in short, pyrography is the art of writing with fire. And today, of course, we're gonna talk about it in the form of a side hustle. I don't know what the Latin or Greek is for that. I tried looking it up, but couldn't figure it out.

So we'll stick with pyrography itself and look at that topic more in the episode where a pyrographer's handcrafted drumsticks ignite into profits. This newspaper company employee creates an Etsy store to market her wood-burned artistic wares. Fire in the hole, that story is coming right up. [Music]

Ella Cordial-Brocklesby is a full-time graphic designer for a large newspaper company. When she's not busy at her day job, she used to paint and hand leather windows for businesses.

Then, in what sounds like another project we need to learn about sometime, she also used to paint race cars. Ella now spends her evenings and weekends as a pyrographer for her Etsy store Cordial Greetings. What's pyrography, you ask? Well, I told you a little bit about it in the introduction, but a more specific definition is the act of producing drawings on wood or leather by using heated tools or flame. Ella stumbled into this line of work when her mother passed away and left her with a lot of art supplies and tools.

Digging through those tools awakened Ella's inner muse, and before long, that muse led to her burning elegant, eye-catching designs into wooden objects. She made a wine box as a gift for a relative. Shortly after, another relative requested the same thing. It was also around this time that Ella's husband lost his job of 20 years. Needing more household income, she realized that she might be able to monetize her pyrography skills into a profitable project.

Up till now, she'd mostly been selling to family members, $5 here, $20 there, it wasn't really a moneymaker. So she started thinking outside the wine box. She knew Etsy was the place to sell handmade goods online, so she figured, why not? She didn't know a lot of people in the area and didn't have a platform to draw from, but with that Etsy shop, she could reach all kinds of people no matter where they lived. It took a month and a half to get her first sale, but by the early fall of 2017, the holiday season gave her a boost.

People were taking notice, and they weren't just noticing, they were buying. Ella was wood burning everything from signs to plaques to wooden ores, but what truly set her apart in the cutthroat wood burning space was her idea to make custom drumsticks. In less than a year, she had a percussive bestseller on her hands. Those wooden drumsticks were ablaze. She could hand draw, hand wood burn, and hand paint a variety of designs on them.

This set her apart because most customized drumsticks were made with machine laser burners. No machine can do what Ella does because of the way she wraps her designs around the drumsticks. While most laser engravers only burn text, she offers fancier designs and colors, even hand painting items upon request. Those sticks were now in full march, attracting the attention of celebrity drummers like Carrie Underwood's drummer Garrett Goodwin. Meanwhile, the Instagram posts from the account she created were drawing the attention of both musicians and non-musicians alike.

Her best tip came in using time-lapse videos of her work in creation. Ella said people love those videos and often watch them over and over. Now that her body of work is increasing, she's also able to display her business cards in local shops, sometimes with a small inventory of her artwork. This has helped bring her more traffic, but she continues to focus most efforts on the online world. When pricing your items, Ella considers the cost of the materials and the time it will take to complete a project.

She tries to burn as quickly as possible so she can still make her prices attractive while remaining competitive. Those prices range from $6 for small magnets to $126 for a rustic wooden ore. I gotta get one of those and put it over my mantle. Well, actually, I don't think I have a mantle now that I think about it, so I probably gotta get a mantle first. Back to Ella.

The best-selling customized coveted drumsticks sell upwards of $40. In 2018, her first full year of doing this on the side, annual profits were $7,000, typically averaging between $500 and $700 a month. However, in November alone, cordial greetings earned over $2,000, so it seems sales are on the rise. To achieve those profits, startup costs were extremely low. Not counting what she'd received from her mother, supplies were just a bundle of wood for $12, a bundle of unfinished drumsticks, $30, and wood sealer for $8.

At some point, she upgraded to a $200 razor-tip wood burner. It lets her give much more detail to the items she works on. This side hustle has helped keep Ella's family funded for some of life's extra amenities, including private music lessons for her two teenagers. Ella's excited and believes she's just getting started. Her Etsy shop is only a year and a half old, and in her words, "Not a lot of people know about me yet." She plans to continue marketing to bands and musicians of all genres, as well as offering to add logos and signatures on drumsticks.

Her long-term goal is for cordial greetings to ignite into her full-time work. That's why she wants to fan the flames and keep stoking the fire. [Music]

Well, there you go. A brief introduction to pyrography. She's got some great visuals as well, so, of course, I would encourage you to come and take a look and see what exactly she is selling.

I do have a couple comments. First of all, we have seen over and over that you're gonna be more successful when you find something to truly specialize in, as opposed to making just all kinds of random art forms. And sometimes, the more you specialize, the more successful you'll be. So, I almost kind of wonder, 'cause I was looking at her shop, Cordial Greetings, and the drumsticks are the best-selling item, but she's also making a bunch of other stuff as well. So, on the one hand, if you're doing the wood burning, might as well make a bunch of stuff.

On the other hand, these customized drumsticks are really interesting. I almost wonder what it would be like to just kind of go all in with that, and then go from not just having an Etsy shop, but also having a website, over time, building more and more organic traffic, especially as people are searching for custom drumsticks, which I would imagine that a lot of drummers or people who want to give a gift to drummers are searching for. And then from there, I also wonder a bit about the shop name, which is Cordial Greetings. Now, her last name is Cordial, so I understand where that comes from, but I almost think, again, with a specialization, what if you made it all about drumsticks and titled it something that was a little bit more closely or obviously connected to that? Just a suggestion or an idea, there's more than one way to do these things, but I know she wants to do it more and potentially eventually make it her full-time work.

So if it were me, I would investigate that event. All right, listeners, I hope you enjoyed this Smoking Hot episode. It's on fire, the podcast is burning down. That's why you wanna make sure to check out the show notes for today's episode, which are at sidehustleschool.com/784. Episode 784 is wrapped.

We'll be back again tomorrow, and I hope you'll join me. It's gonna be the weekly recap, and then much more to come all next week. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]

From The Onward Project.