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]

Got a great story for you today. It's 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 his first year, he receives more than a thousand orders and makes $43,000. Welcome to Side Hustle School.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. It is a crazy world out there, my friends. Are you taking advantage of some of the opportunities that are coming your way? Or if not, some of the opportunities, how about just one? Don't feel overwhelmed.

Don't feel like you're missing out on all the different opportunities, all the different things you could do. I want you to choose just one opportunity, something that you could do. Ask yourself what one thing you could try so that you could have a story just like the ones I'm telling you every single day. And the whole point of this show is to teach through storytelling and show you that you don't have to be an internet celebrity. You don't have to have a lot of resources or wealth or really any kind of special knowledge apart from what you already know.

That is our mission. The show is completely free. Got a quick thank you to our sponsor that allows that to be possible. And then I'll tell you about this Trader Joe's sign artist who earns $43,000 selling T-stained prints. [Music]

It was a sunny spring day and Elliot Adeso, 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 both. 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 found the opportunity to bring it to life. For his mom's present, he decided to try printing an antique royalty-free image he had found online of an illustration from the 1800s. And he printed this on some old T-stained paper. It worked better than he imagined and looked fantastic when it was framed in his mom's kitchen. Capitalizing on his success, at least with his mom, Elliot began to create a library of royalty-free, unlicensed imagery that he could use as digital collages printed on that T-stained paper.

He figured that if he could make and sell a few prints a month, he could use that cash 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 him save for a deposit on a place of his own. Some place where he'd have more natural light to work, and also some place where no one would ask what time he'd be coming home that night.

At first, Elliot was intimidated to start an online shop. Would anyone want to buy his art? But when he went to look at the listings on Etsy.com, 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 with a T-stained twist. Elliot didn't wait long to start setting up his shop.

Spending some time creating prints after his shift at Trader Joe's, he uploaded them, sat back, and waited. Then one day, about 10 days later, while checking his email, Elliot noticed something he hadn't seen before. He had a new message with the subject Etsy transactions, and he realized he had made his first sale. That was the first of 1,000 sales he would make that year. The first sale was an image of a pug riding a whale.

And the majority of sales that soon followed were dogs riding whales, or unicorns, or some other animal. It wasn't quite what he'd expected, but he decided to follow the pattern of what was selling and listened to buyers' requests. Those requests were basically for more dogs on top of things. When he noticed he was getting lots of messages asking for new animal combinations, he added a custom option to his page. Sales for his dog-themed T-prints really started to pour in.

Or was it just that he was steeped in St. Bernard's? Regardless, in his second year, he more than doubled his first year of sales with 2,500 orders, and he's making about $3,600 a month. All of this is built on startup costs of just $300, which he spent on teabags, bubble mailers, and paid for listing fees. Remember, the images that he's using to make the prints are often hundreds of years old and therefore free from copyright.

He's grown the business by investing in promoted listings on Etsy, paying for Facebook ads, and being active on Instagram. Because his customers tend to buy prints as gifts, he ramps up his ad spend during peak buying times like Black Friday and the pre-holiday season. He also notes that experimenting with look-alike audiences for his Facebook ads based on his Etsy customers has been one of the most effective tools for generating traffic and conversions. Elliot still works as a sign artist at Trader Joe's, but he's shifted to part-time to devote more attention to his shop, which he calls T-Stained Madness. Sales of his prints are so successful, they've now become his main source of income.

It even helped him pay off a quarter of his student loan 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 his prints. And again, no one asks what time he comes home at night. Major benefit. While there's never enough time in the day, Elliot wouldn't be where he is now if he waited for everything to be just right.

Let that be a lesson to someone out there. Yesterday, it was starting an Etsy shop. Today, it's adding art shows and craft fairs to the roster. Whatever he's off to next, side hustling seems like Elliot's cup of tea. [Music]

All right, I have a couple comments about this business model here.

The key to selling low-priced products, which is what he's doing, is to sell a lot of them. And in his case, he has been able to do that. I mean, he did 1,000 prints the first year, 2,500 prints the second year, still going strong. So that's great, of course. And it's also great that he can use royalty-free, copyright-free images.

That way, he doesn't get into any issues of copyright infringement or having to pay royalties. He doesn't have to deal with anything like that. Now, on the other hand, this business model is a little shaky. When I say shaky, I don't mean there's anything wrong with it. I just mean it probably is not gonna last forever because there's nothing really proprietary about what he's doing.

So the good news is he doesn't have to worry about the royalties or the copyright. The bad news is pretty much anyone can do this. So normally in this situation, I would suggest raising the price. Like if you've got a lot of low-priced items, see if you can start increasing the average sales price. But in this case, his buyers, these buyers of the prints probably wouldn't go for that just because they are low-priced items to begin with.

And if they don't get them from him, they can probably go somewhere else. So as a next step, I'd suggest thinking about a different art form or a treatment that's totally new. Perhaps something that has more differentiation, perhaps a larger size, something that's more difficult for other people to make. I'm not quite sure what it would be since I'm not the artist, but Elliot seems like he's pretty smart. So hopefully he'll figure that out.

And in the meantime, no complaints, he's making $3,600 a month. So again, a remarkable success. And I know we have a lot of people listening who have student loan debt. Side hustling is a great way to pay off that burden. So it's not so much of an obligation or a hindrance, something standing in your way from doing something that's meaningful to you, but you've got this debt, you have to pay it off.

Well, again, side hustle, a great way to deal with that. That's my encouragement for you for the day. Our show notes, all right, sidehustleschool.com/635. If you want to take a look at some of his tea stain prints, perhaps purchase one for yourself or as a gift. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better.

Don't forget to find one opportunity, just one thing that you can do to get closer to something that is meaningful to you. Follow your dream, follow your goals. If you're like most of our listeners, you have at least some sense that you want to create more independence for yourself, whether it's through a creative project, through a project that just exists to make money because you need to make money, like that is totally okay. Or if you're looking to do something beyond that, if you really want to create a full-time income, potentially leave your job. Whatever it is that you ultimately hope to do, just take a little bit of time today to do one task, one next step.

And then tomorrow, maybe another step, because tomorrow we've got another story right here on "Side Hustle School." I hope you will join me for it. Again, be sure to subscribe, tell your friends about the show. It is completely free. Again, my name is Chris Guillebeau, and this is "Side Hustle School."