Military Spouse Finds Joy in Punny Greeting Cards

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

Today on the program, we're going to look at a greeting card side hustle that focuses on puns. It's all about puns, actually. Punny greeting cards designed and sold by a military spouse who uses humor to make the distance between herself and her deployed partner a little easier. This was a real challenge to work on this episode because obviously we don't like puns here. Puns are just not cool, so this was a bit of a stretch, but I managed to over-pun this concern and persevere.

Actually true story, there is one guy out there that emails me every time we have an episode that has a lot of puns in it and he's like, "Chris, I really like the show, but could you cut back on the puns? Really appreciate that. Thanks." To which I say, "Oh, absolutely, of course. I will completely take that feedback into account. No more puns at all inside a school." Right.

Also, this episode has an interesting lesson about Etsy and using your own website. Now, this is kind of fun because we often have stories about somebody who's using a platform like Etsy or Shopify or similar. They often face this question of, "Do I also develop my own site?" And then, "How do I get people off of Etsy or whatever the platform is to my own site?" This person has found a happy medium. I'll explain a bit about how it works, but basically they've found a way to make their own site but still do all their sales through Etsy. This could be helpful to somebody out there in a similar situation.

All right. Stay tuned. Military spouse finds joy in punny greeting cards. It's coming right up. Angelica and Nick Hanley met, like many millennials do, on a dating app.

As a lover of puns, Angelica likes to say that her husband swiped her off her feet. The two instantly hit it off. They began texting and FaceTiming every day. There was only one problem, and it was a big one. Although their connection to each other was powerful, their Wi-Fi connection needed to be even stronger.

You see, Angelica lived in Maryland, and Nick was stationed in Japan as a Navy pilot. As months went by, the couple was still going strong. Angelica even flew out to Japan for their first official date. But though they were head over heels for each other, the distance was, understandably, still very hard. That's when Angelica started sending Nick puns in their texts back and forth.

It made the distance seem shorter, kept them happy and laughing, rather than focusing on how apart they were. They kept up their punning around for two years. Whenever they got time to spend together in person, Angelica continued the antics by taking pictures of Nick and adding "punderful" captions to them. She would post them online, and her family and friends soon began to encourage the double entendres. A few years after they met, Nick moved back to the United States to continue his service in Corpus Christi, Texas.

Finally in the same country, Angelica moved south and away from her bustling east coast life. Although she was happy to be with Nick, life wasn't suddenly "perfect." For the first time, she had to get used to being away from her family and her big city life. Without the abundance of hobbies and social circles she was used to, she began to feel isolated and alone. And the need to dig herself out of this hole is where our story picks up. Angelica was searching for a way to bring more joy into her life.

And because of Nick's military service, she wanted to find a way that whatever it was, she could take it with her, regardless of distance. Then she thought back to the way she created joy the last time distance was weighing her down. With puns, of course! She remembered how much her friends and family enjoyed her wordplay. Suddenly Angelica realized that she might actually be able to sell her ideas in the form of punny greeting cards.

So in the summer of 2017, she got to work out her first few designs and posted them on an Etsy shop called "A Couple Puns." One of the cards featured a sketch of Lady Gaga saying, "Baby, you were born this day!" Another one featured two dinosaurs kissing, decked out in wedding garb, above the phrase, "You make a dynamite couple." Between buying inventory and the Etsy membership, her startup costs were only about $50. But what she was saving in money, Angelica invested in time. She committed to working on her new project consistently. It was a great source of creativity and joy in her life, and she wanted to make sure she did things right. That commitment paid off, literally.

Orders began to come in only a few days after Angelica launched her Etsy shop. Since then, she's continued to build up her hustle. She began to use Pattern. This is interesting, so pay attention. She began to use Pattern, a feature on Etsy that allows the shop owner to have a separate website that is linked to their Etsy shop.

By having a separate webpage, she's able to show more of a couple puns' personality. She can also tell people to just go to the website rather than having to send them a complicated Etsy link. Not only that, but most of her customers don't realize that her sales come through Etsy, so it allows her brand to legitimize itself without the high fees that come with many other ecommerce platforms. After launching in 2017, Angelica has continued to find ways to get the word out about her greeting cards. She uses her marketing skills from her day job to run Instagram and Facebook pages.

She's also found success in collaborations and giveaways. Not only that, but just a few months after launch, Angelica had her first pop-up store. She's now a big believer in them, saying that pop-ups create amazing exposure, and that even if only one person comes into her shop, it's worth the time and money she spends setting it up. But fortunately, she usually sees a lot more than one person. Since then, Angelica has scored a few wholesale deals and is on the hunt for more.

The key to her success is to keep updating listings and to consistently refresh the shop. Not only that, but she now releases her cards in batches of 20, rather than one at a time. She makes the color schemes consistent, so they look more appealing on the shelves and on her website. Some of her most popular cards to date are "I'm So Excited I Almost Wet My Plants" with a photo of plants on it, a "I'm Pumped for You" breast pump card for new moms, and a "Thanks a Watt" card with a light bulb on the front. Two years on, this self-proclaimed "Entre Panure" is making anywhere from $300 to $500 a week from her hustle.

She's still based on Etsy and uses that pattern platform. Although her original goal was to sell 50 cards, Angelica has now sold over 2,500 hundredful cards and counting. So this pattern feature by Etsy is really cool. I would recommend that anybody who has an Etsy shop that is actually doing okay, you're seeing some sales and you want to invest more, at least invest more of your time into growing it to definitely check this out at Etsy.com/pattern. We'll link that up and everything else in the show notes.

Looks like they have a 30-day trial and then it's $15 a month after that, and they're not a sponsor. I'm just mentioning this because I think it could be helpful. And when I looked at Angelica's site, couplepuns.com, it really is a pretty seamless process in the sense that you're looking at this site that looks completely unique and disconnected from Etsy. And then when you go to checkout, it's only on that final checkout page that it says "powered by Etsy" and you realize you're actually going through that Etsy shop. Which most people aren't going to care about, but I just think the aesthetic of it is better.

And like Angelica told us, she feels like it legitimizes the process a bit more. So pretty cool thing there for some folks to check out. A few of my other favorite cards, by the way, because I got lost browsing her site. When I think about you, I touch my elf with a photo of an elf, of course. It never ends with a photo of the Spice Girls.

Happy Lamaca. I guess you can probably guess what that one would have a photo of, a llama. And you look sharp for your age with a photo of a cactus. So lots of cool stuff there. I love it.

I think in terms of business success and future growth, the key there really is getting more of those wholesale deals, more retail distributorships, just being able to be in more places. So if there's anyone out there who's able to help with that, definitely check out her site and get in touch. Children is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Those show notes. All right, sidehustleschool.com/970.

That is 9-7-0. Thank you so much, my friends. We are keeping it fundamental here on the show. Much more is on the way. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.