Nov 1

Nov 1 Special Announcement: Opening my Own Etsy Shop!

I have an exciting announcement to make here on Jody Write Now: I've opened my own Etsy Shop. It's called Love Disabled Life, and you can check it out here.

For several years, I've had the idea of wanting to share themes of positive disability identity and experiences of disabled life. I first explored this idea by vlogging my life on YouTube and sharing my disabled experiences. But as I've watched other digital creatives monetize their various talents on social media, I started to ask myself, "If they can do it, why can't I?"

Despite what you hear about overnight YouTube sensations, the grind of being a small creator on YouTube is, well, a grind. It is a slow process that requires a lot of hard work and consistency. And even more so when you are in a niche like the disability community. I quickly realized monetizing through that platform was not a realistic goal. At least not right now.

You can read more about the origin story for Love Disabled LIfe in this blog post. In addition to all the reasons I describe in that post, I also wanted to start a small business to explore my entrepreneurial curiosities and contribute to our family income.

So I reached back to my graphic design skills. I have always loved design work and have freelanced on and off over the years. I love it the most when I have the freedom to creatively express my vision without being beholden to a spec request. Don't get me wrong. I love good client relationships. It's just when working with clients, sometimes I feel like the hired help. Working for myself is TRUE freelancing for me.

Additionally, I've always been excited by the thought of owning my own business. Yes, I dabbled a little bit with that through my graphic design freelancing business. But I never pursued freelancing to a point where it made a substantial or sustainable source of income. It provides a lot of other intrinsic value for me: creativity, passion, fun. But you can't buy a loaf of bread with fun.

After consuming a lot of entrepreneurial content on the internet, I realized what I needed was scalability. A business I can do that combines my talent with my passion and convert that into passive income. Now, I know some people hear the words "passive income" and are immediately turned off because it's a too-good-to-be-true promise of making money while doing nothing. I was one of those people for a while. But once I got over my hang-ups and studied what other creative entrepreneurs were doing, I realized the phrase passive income only gets a bad wrap because of the negative connotations associated with it, not what it actually is.

In reality, passive income is far from passive. There is a lot of work that goes into creating the business upfront. The hope is that once all that initial work is complete, you can slow down a bit and enjoy the ride—kind of like a jet plane pulling back its engines once it is at cruising altitude. Of course, there is still a lot of work involved in maintaining the business, things like making new designs, social media posting and marketing, and all the accounting. But all those things can be managed over time or delegated to contracted experts in those fields.

One reason I launched my Love Disabled Life Shop on Etsy is that I am building out LDLs entire social media platform. I don't have a large social media following yet, and I needed Etsy's extensive marketplace search engine to make sales and get exposure. After all, Etsy has been around a long time, providing a marketplace for small businesses and niche sellers, so I felt they would give me the most significant chance for success. Over time, as my blog, YouTube channel, and other social media platforms for Love Disabled Life grow, I may consider diversifying my sales platforms, but for now, I'm happy with what Etsy is doing for my business.

At the time of this writing, I have had 68 sales, and my shop has only been open for about six months. I'm pretty proud of that. To be completely honest, it still kind of blows my mind that I've had even one sale. I'm proud of the designs I make, and I think they have worth. But knowing total strangers see my work and feel that way too, well, that is so special. I'm having a hard time putting it into words, really. Probably because that specialness is more of something I feel. Without getting overly sappy, I'll just say that creating something original and someone else validating that effort by consuming it in some way (viewing, liking, sharing, and maybe even purchasing) is such an honor.

As for what success for Love Disabled Life looks like, well, the answer isn't a fixed dollar amount or subscriber number. I'm motivated by my mission to help increase positive disability identity in whatever way I can. I genuinely believe it is one of the missing pieces of the disability rights movement. We must be more effective at rewriting the narrative of what being disabled is, as well as the perception of being disabled. And a large part of this work has to come from within our own community as well.

If my t-shirts, buttons, posters, and stickers can help do that AND I can be creative and get paid to do it, well, as the late Katharine Graham is quoted as saying: