This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey, hey, what's up? Welcome, this is Chris Guillebeau. Today, we've got a Throwback Thursday segment. Throwback Thursday slash Where Are They Now, where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. So far in these segments, we have had a New York City musician with a blog teaching jazz that becomes a multiple six-figure business, and more recently, an Australian woman who draws houses.
Her entire side hustle, now full-time business, is drawing and selling illustrations of homes. And today, in our latest feature, we'll hear from a graphic designer who does custom illustrations for weddings and other events. This, too, is now a big business. It's actually a seven-figure business. Pretty incredible, and just a reminder, every story that we have ever featured on the show begins as a side hustle.
So none of these are projects that have investors or full-time entrepreneurs that are doing it. Sometimes they turn into full-time entrepreneurs, but the point is, the origin is as a side project, okay? Because I think anybody can do a side project, and you never know what's gonna happen. Now, in this story, a New York City designer, Kristen Berry, tapped into the wedding e-commerce market and was able to get out of debt and turn her hustle into full-time work. What is most impressive to me is that she has scaled this business to such a significant revenue mark, which is an illustration business.
So how do you do that? Okay, you're gonna hear a little bit about that from her. And not every side hustle has to scale, of course. That's why we look at a variety of stories. I am just as happy with those who make $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month, whatever.
But we have a range of outcomes. So let's just kind of go into it and hear from her. She's made some major changes in getting away from the platform that helped her get started. So Kristen is here to tell us about that. I'll be back at the end to wrap us up.
[Music]
My name is Kristen Berry-Mastores. I live in New York City. My business side hustle is Miss Design Berry. And I was on episode 178. Miss Design Berry is an e-commerce shop.
We specialize in custom illustration pieces for weddings and other big events. I graduated and moved to New York in 2011, and I was working in advertising. And even though I was making good money, I still needed extra money. And I had gone to school for design and illustration. So I just started an Etsy shop and started doing it on the side after work and slowly, slowly grew it.
And then in 2015 is when I ended up leaving my full-time job to run Miss Design Berry full-time. Since I was last on the show, I ended up working with a business coach for about 18 months. And he helped me actually really change our pricing model and the way we interact with our clients. One of my goals was to move all of our business off of Etsy. It took us about one year and we did end up doing that.
We sell to a smaller group of clientele now, with a much higher average order value. So as of 2019, our revenue was still about 1 million. And so this year will probably grow about 20%. Beyond that, we are launching a second brand, a children's brand later this spring, which makes kind of sense. It's the logical next step because the next thing for our clients, they get married and they start their own family.
So we'll be doing lots of stuff for sort of a first child in new families. And then the last update is that I have started doing some consulting work as well for other small businesses who are looking to move from a primarily Etsy-focused business to their own website as well. So I have launched my own website and we'll be launching an online course for that later this year. If you are a small creative business, Etsy is a really wonderful place to start. You're able to get sort of built-in traffic.
You can test out products and really see what the market wants and what's maybe not so popular. And you're able to get a lot of feedback from clients and really kind of figure out where your footing is and what you ultimately want to be selling. For us, we reached a certain point where there was a lot of competition who were basically just ripping this off. We were paying an insane amount in fees yearly for Etsy. And Etsy was changing a lot of their logistics and the way that they ran things.
So what had worked for us for several years in terms of advertising and that sort of stuff had really started to become a lot more expensive. And we were at a point where we kind of knew what our niche was. We knew who our target clientele was and we felt like we were ready to move off the platform and just have a bit more freedom. I think for anyone who's looking to sell our illustration design, some kind of something under that umbrella online, it really is helpful today to have a very specialized niche because the more specific you can be in what you're selling and who you're targeting, there's a lot out there. There's a lot of competition.
And if you're trying to blanket and sell to everyone, you're gonna sell to no one. And for us, we've realized we've gotten more and more and more specialized as the years go on. And that's only helped us grow, which sometimes it can seem like that doesn't make sense, but it really does. One really special component that we've kind of added into our business model is we have partnered with a dog charity called the Beagle Freedom Project and a portion of all of our sales now goes directly to them. It's something I'm really passionate about, dogs and rescue organizations.
And so that's been like a goal for me ever since I started my business. So I'm really happy now that we're able to really give back to them through our business and all the clients that we're able to service. [Music]
Thank you, Kristin. Very much appreciate those updates and advice. Let's talk about Etsy fees for a moment before I wrap it up.
It's not just about the listing and sales fees. I've been thinking about this because I often mention how sometimes people who sell on Etsy end up getting frustrated and going on to do their own thing, setting up their own websites. They're not dependent on that platform, which is a good thing to do. But I think it's not just the listing and sales fees. It's also about this advertising arms race to where to be successful, especially in a competitive market, you don't just pay the basic commission.
You almost have to pay these increasing advertising costs. And we see this with Facebook as well. Businesses that are built on Facebook ads sometimes end up in an industry which is super competitive. You just have to keep spending and spending and spending. And so fortunately, Kristin has found a way to essentially exit the arms race.
So good for her. I also want to give a shout out to the Beagle Freedom Project that she mentioned. Check them out at bfp.org and visit Kristin's shop at misedesignberry.com. I'm so grateful to her for helping us with this segment. I will be doing them, these segments throughout 2020.
Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than 1,000 stories. 2020 is our year of interaction. If you have a question, if you'd like to update us about your hustle, if you would like a free save the date invitation to my upcoming book tour. It's not custom illustrated, but you know, it is free. It is a save the date invitation.
Go to moneytreebook.com. Actually, the first part is to go to sidehustleschool.com/questions. But for the save the date invitation to my book tour, go to moneytreebook.com. This has been episode 1174. Thank you so much, my friends.
Do come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
