Trader Joe's Sign Artist Earns $43,200 Selling Tea-Stained Prints

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

[Music]

Today's story is all about a Trader Joe's sign artist who wants to pay off his student loans and get out of his mom's basement. So he learns to make tea-stained prints. In the first year, he receives more than a thousand orders and makes $43,000. He then goes on to receive tens of thousands of orders after that. What can I say, folks?

It is a crazy world out there. There are all kinds of opportunities out there. And I love to feature artists who are making some real money. So that's what we've got here today. And ask yourself, perhaps as you listen, are you taking advantage of some of the opportunities that are coming your way?

Or how about just one opportunity? There's something you can do. One opportunity you can pursue. If you're new to the show, my name's Chris Guillebeau, your host, it's called Side Hustle School. For more than nine years, we've been running daily episodes, seven days a week, all about different ideas, case studies, actionable information you can take and help run your own side hustle, start or grow or evolve, whatever it is.

If you have a side hustle, that's great. We can help you make more money if you've never had a side hustle or a small business and you don't think of yourself as an entrepreneur. Well, that's okay. Side Hustle School is for you. Excited to bring you today's story.

Trader Joe's Sign Artist earns $43,200 selling tea stained prints. It's coming up right after this quick shout out to our sponsor. [Music]

It was a sunny spring day and Elliot Adesso, a Trader Joe's Sign Artist from Virginia, was in a bit of a pickle. It was his mom's birthday that weekend and he needed a gift. But what do you buy the woman who has everything?

Probably something meaningful, handmade, or all of the above. Fortunately, Elliot was creative and he worked well under pressure. In college, he had experimented with staining paper with tea and painting over it to create images. He'd always liked the aesthetic, but never really found the opportunity to bring it to life. So for his mom's present, he decided to try printing an antique royalty-free image he'd found online of an 1800s illustration of some root vegetables.

He did this onto some old tea stained paper. It worked better than he imagined and looked fantastic framed in his mother's kitchen. Capitalizing on this success, Elliot started to create a library of royalty-free, unlicensed imagery he could use as digital collages, which he would then print on, again, tea stained paper. He figured if he could make and sell a few prints a month, he could use the money to start paying off his student loans faster. Not only that, but at the time, he was living in his mom's basement.

And as nice as it was to be close to family, the basement of the home he'd grown up in was a little too close. Some extra money would help save up money for a deposit on a place of his own. Some place where no one would ask him what time he'd be coming home that night. Elliot was intimidated about starting an online shop. Would anyone want to buy his art?

But when he went to look at the listings on Etsy, he noticed that there were several successful shops that were printing public domain images and Photoshopping them over antique dictionary pages. And if they could do it and make money from it, so could he, and he could do it with his own tea stained twist. After spending time creating prints after work, he uploaded them, sat back, and waited. One day, while checking his email, Elliot noticed something he hadn't seen before. He got an email with the subject Etsy Transactions and realized he had made his first sale.

It was the first of 1,000 he would make just that year. That first sale was an image of a pug riding a whale, and the majority of sales that soon followed were similar, dogs riding whales or unicorns. It wasn't quite what he'd expected, but he decided to follow the pattern of what was selling and listen to buyers' requests, which was basically more dogs on top of things. After he noticed he was getting lots of messages asking for new animal combinations, he decided to add a custom option to his page. Sales for those dog-themed tea prints really started to pour in.

In his second year, he more than doubled his first year of sales. He had 2,500 orders, was making about $3,600 a month in profit, and all that was built on startup costs of just $300 to buy teabags, bubble mailers, and listing fees. Remember, the art that he's using to make the prints is antique and therefore free from copyright. At the time of our original story, Elliot was still working as a sign artist at Trader Joe's, but had shifted to part-time to devote more attention to tea-stained madness, the name of his shop. Sales of his prints are so successful, they become the main source of income, even helping him pay off a quarter of his student debt much faster than expected.

More importantly, he's been able to move out of his mom's basement into a great apartment with the perfect studio room for creating more prints. While there's never enough time in the day, Elliot wouldn't be where he is now if he had waited for everything to be just right. Yesterday, it was starting at an Etsy shop. Today, it's adding art shows and craft fairs to the roster. Whatever he does next, side hustling seems like Elliot's cup of tea.

[Music]

Well, this was a fun one because whenever we record archival stories, like when we rerecord, we go back and look for updates and like what's the business doing now? And in this case, I was like, well, maybe this business just started and then now he's doing something else, like the beard oil guy from last week. But in this case, I see that tea-stained madness has been going for 12 years, it looks like, and has 46,000 sales. So in our original episode, we were like 1,000 sales one year and then 2,500 the next. It looks like he has continued and just continued and continued and continued.

46,000 sales on the Etsy shop. You can see it for yourself there, tea-stained madness. And these products don't cost a lot, but I guess the key to selling low-priced products is to sell a lot of them because obviously he's doing pretty well and is still doing much the same thing. I'm sure he's doing some other stuff as well, but cool to see that the model still works. Maybe a reminder that there is an opportunity for you too, as I said in the beginning.

There's opportunities everywhere. What can you do to take advantage of one? Just one. There's something you can do. I hope you will take action.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Thanks so much for tuning in. My name's Chris Guillebeau, your host of Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.