This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Hey there, welcome to Side Hustle School. Thanks for tuning in today. My name's Chris Guillebeau. And just as we start today's episode, I do want to give you a sensitivity warning. The update from our listener that you're gonna hear contains a reference to self-harm, a tragedy in fact.
Now, obviously there's much more to the story after that, but I just wanted to note it here in case anyone prefers to skip it. All right, today's episode is part of a new feature we're doing in 2022 called Your First Thousand Dollars. As you might surmise from the title, it's all about how someone made their first thousand dollars. How did they get to that point? Not their first hundred thousand dollars, which is awesome, but also probably a long story.
So we're gonna look at how somebody got started. It's been a wonderful feature to work on this year. And with that in mind, today's feature comes from Christy Tharp in Des Moines, Iowa. Christy is the owner of an Etsy shop called The Blue Break Front, which initially began out of a family tragedy. Christy has gone on from that to build it into a steady source of income.
And also, this is kind of my interpretation here, so I'm adding it, but also a well-deserved source of pride and self-confidence. Again, that's for me, but however you look at it, it's a beautiful business. But what about her first thousand dollars? How did she make it happen? What did it feel like?
And what did she learn? So let's hear it from Christy. I'll come back at the end with a quick wrap-up. [Music]
Hello, Side Hustle School listeners. My name is Christy Tharp, and I am the owner of The Blue Break Front.
My shop sells antique and vintage glass and pottery housewares, specializing in depression and carnival glass. The story of how I made my first thousand dollars in my side hustle starts with the story of how I came to open an Etsy store to begin with. There were a lot of factors that led me to that decision. I'd been a long-time Etsy shopper for my collection of red transferware dishes, Victorian and Edwardian jewelry, and vintage dresses from the '50s and '60s. I really loved some specific shops on the site because of the curated collections and the way those shop owners styled their listings.
In March 2017, I lost my husband of 17 years to suicide. Life as I had known it was fractured. There was me before and there was me after. And as some time passed, some of those things that I had previously collected just didn't fit the me that I now was. So around a year and a half after my husband died, I was ready to say goodbye to some of those things.
Around this same time, I was fortunate enough to have a new coworker at my job as a manager at an insurance company. Brynn is young, sharp and ambitious, and she had a side hustle as a wedding planner. I was inspired by her hustle and her energy and that little seed of an idea to start my own side hustle started to grow. I credit her really with being the tipping point. Going from I should open my own store to I'm going to open my own store was the first hurdle.
Once I had made that decision, I knew all the rest was just going to be an education. But obviously you can't sell anything until you list it. And I didn't know anything. In my head, I made it a lot more complicated than it was. Ultimately, I wanted to see how far I could get without buying any extra equipment.
Would I need a computer? Would I need a printer, a special camera, a shipping scale? The answer to all of those was, and actually still is, no. I continue to run my shop using only my cell phone. Etsy's platform was easy, but it also gave me the opportunity to create a style for my shop.
And that was important to me. If I was going to have a store, I wanted it to represent me and my personal sense of design. I didn't want quick, minimalist, white background photos. I wanted to showcase the items the way they could be displayed and give the buyer a sense of what they'd look like as part of their home with photo props and fresh flowers. The same things that drew me to my own favorite Etsy shops.
Etsy encourages you to list 20 items to start your shop. And once I had figured out how to do one, the rest was all just refinement of the same process, improving the pictures and videos, making the descriptions engaging, and finding the best search tags for each item. I came up with a process that worked for me. Washing items by hand so that I could easily identify any flaws, taking pictures and videos of each item and measuring the pieces. Then I edit the videos using the InShot app.
Finally, I add the listings to the shop. Sales were slow at first. I had very few listings and no reviews. On some of my initial listings, I lost money not knowing how to calculate shipping correctly, but I learned from each item that I took to the post office. I learned how to make the entire listing process more efficient.
I learned how to ship fragile glass around the world by having some orders break early on. And I learned what people liked, what they collected, and what was oversaturated or undervalued on the platform so that I could make better decisions when I was purchasing from thrift stores and auctions. In September, 2018, when I opened my shop, I made three sales totaling under $50. The next few months grew exponentially. Four months later in December, 2018, I made 27 sales totaling over $1,000.
So with expenses, it only took about four months for my shop to make its first $1,000 in profit. There is still so much I can learn from utilizing social media to its best, to growing in my knowledge of the collectibles themselves. I have a renewed sense of happiness now with each vintage item I find, and I'm content being its temporary owner. I'm now remarried, and my husband Andy has required as good an eye as mine for some of the good stuff at thrift stores and auctions, and since the pandemic, he has taken over handling the many trips to the post office. Thank you for listening to my story, and I hope it encourages some of you to take that first step to creating your own side hustle.
Best wishes to you all. - Well, I really respect how Christy learned as she went along, you know, and she's just sharing all that very transparently about how she lost money on shipping, she tried listing stuff that didn't sell, and so on. You know, this is the side hustler's journey, right? Like the updated Joseph Campbell hero's journey, but along the way she learned and improved. So good for her.
Also, isn't it pretty cool she continues to run her shop using only her cell phone, and she's selling a lot. You know, this is not just like a one-stop kind of item. As I said, she's really built it into a business. So thanks so much, Christy, for telling us about your first thousand dollars. Listeners, I hope you found it encouraging.
Check out her Etsy shop, The Blue Breakfront. If you just go to Etsy.com and search The Blue Breakfront or Christy Fart, you should be able to find it. We will link it up on the notes page as well. If you've got a question or an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions, let me know how you're doing out there. I am cheering you on wherever you are in the world.
My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
