A few short months ago, I decided to embark on the adventure of starting my own Print-on-Demand Etsy shop. As my senior project approached, I decided to apply what I’ve learned from my Visual Communication classes to create more designs for t-shirts, sweatshirts, and journals. I also wanted to use what I learned in my Design for Social Media class to run an Instagram account to increase traffic to my shop. Additionally, I decided to use this as an opportunity to learn more about how SEO works on Etsy. 

I set some goals for my project deliverables:

• Create 6 to 8 designs and publish them on Etsy
• Publish 3 of the designs I created before this semester
• Create and post at least 6 Instagram reels

Preparing to Design

Picking My Target Audience 

I started by identifying a target audience for my Etsy shop. I looked at several similar companies on Instagram and their popular reels, what their followers follow, the ages of their models, etc. This is what I came up with:

Target Audience: Latter-day Saints, especially ages 21-35, navigating through young adult challenges like college and post-mission life and young parenting who are looking for hope and happiness and reasons to keep following Jesus Christ.

My target audience helped me know what kind of social media content to create and what types of designs I might want. Most of the people I asked for feedback from on my designs were in this audience as well.

How I used SEO

In my Design for Social Media class, I learned about how important it is to research popular hashtags and trending audios to help your account increase in followers. I wanted to apply this same principle to my Etsy shop by using popular keywords that are often searched for to increase traffic and sales.

I used a free tool called Alura. In the tool, you can search keywords you are considering using for your items and it will tell you how popular it is on Etsy.

As an example, I wanted to do some designs with Rexburg, Idaho, my college town, in mind so I used Alura to search for the word “Rexburg”. I found that Rexburg has recently increased in search volume and it’s actually pretty popular. There are only about 200 sellers on Etsy with products with “Rexburg” in it, so the competition is fairly low. 

Taking this research into account, I decided that I wanted to create products with the name, “Rexburg” in them because they have a good likelihood of being successful.

How I Create Designs – Making “The Land of the Frozen Chosen” Hoodie

During my Vector Graphic and Professional Imaging classes, I learned how important it is to sketch out your designs several times with many variations to help refine your idea before making it digitally. I used this same process to make my Rexburg hoodie. 

One day in class, my professor mentioned that Rexburg used to be jokingly called, “The Land of the Frozen Chosen” because of the harsh winters. I liked that phrase and thought it could do well on a hoodie. In the middle of class, I quickly sketched some ideas in my sketchbook and went into further iterations at home.

After sketching, I created the design in Adobe Illustrator. I quickly came across a challenge. I wanted to offer this design on both light-colored sweatshirts and dark-colored hoodies, but I found that the text only stood out well enough to read it on certain colors. This meant that I needed two different versions of the same design – one for light and one for dark. 

I received feedback from my professor that it would be better to have them both outlined in black and then have an additional white outline on the one for darker designs. I also received feedback that the snow on the mountains in the text was inconsistent and I should make the snow pointy so it felt more like ice.

After the design was complete, and I was satisfied with how it looked, then it was time to get it ready to list on Etsy. I uploaded it to Printify, my print-on-demand provider, and selected 3 to 5 product product color options.

Then I went back to that search result on Alura and researched more successful keywords to use in my product title, description, and tags. 

How I Ran The Instagram Account

Creating Reels

Throughout the semester, I created seven different reels for my Instagram account @sunshinebydesignhub. I created two product-focused reels, two inspirational reels, and three funny reels. The funny reels all incorporated trending audio.

The videos with the trending Instagram audios were typically the ones that performed the best. My two latest reels with trending audio performed really well. One of them received over 1500 plays, and the other got over 1800 plays in less than 24 hours. 

Watch Reel Here

Running an Ad

My third best-performing reel was product-focused, and I ran it as an ad. My goal was to help get more profile visits on my Instagram account. I paid three dollars a day for three days, While that wasn’t a lot of money, it did help increase the views and interactions on my page. 

The reel has a total of 736 plays and reached a total of 134 of those were replays. The ad helped me get 273 of those plays and helped me get 11 profile visits. 

What Were The Final Results?

Etsy Stats

Throughout the last 10 weeks, my shop had a total of 92 views and 1 order. 46 of those views came from Social Media. Before this project, I was getting hardly any views at all, so this traffic increase is quite significant and my efforts this semester really did help my shop. While I haven’t had many sales yet, I am confident that as I continue these efforts my shop will continue to get more views and sales in the coming months.

My Final Products:

Throughout the project, I created 7 designs and published two previously created ones. Of the seven designs, one of them was placed on two different product types (T-shirt and journal), and another one had two different variations – one for light-colored sweatshirts and the other for dark-colored hoodies. 

Note: These product mock-ups were created by my print provider, Printify, since making mock-ups was not the focus of this project.

To see these images in full size, scroll down to the bottom of the page.

Full product gallery: