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Hey everybody, what's up? Welcome friends, listeners, community. I'm so glad you're here. My name is Chris Dillebo.
This program is called Side Hustle School. For the past 1400 days, 1416 days to be precise, I've been bringing you all these different stories from all over the world, focusing on people who find a way to make extra money without quitting their job, often in a very creative or unusual way, and they do so without taking a lot of risk, without going into debt, without stressing themselves out too much, because this year has been stressful enough. I just feel so fortunate to be able to bring you these stories and also speak to our global community of people who are all trying to do the same thing, but in different ways. Not to me as the beauty of this whole project is people are doing the same thing or have the same values, but they approach it quite differently and such.
So thank you for being part of that. I hope your year has been, I guess, as good as possible. It's always hard to know what to say sometimes this year with everything in the mix. But let's just try to move forward as positively as possible.
Today, I'm going to talk to you about paper bead jewelry. Now, the art of paper bead jewelry began during the Victorian age of mid-1800s England. Creative women would get together and spend time crafting beads from scraps of elaborate old wallpaper. And as I read that sentence, I'm thinking maybe some men did it too.
But who knows? You know, I'm guessing like Victorian age, it was probably more women. Well, today's story picks it up a couple hundred years later. When an art student and bookstore employee looks for ways to supplement her income, she invents a new art form making paper bead jewelry from popular books.
We're going to talk about that art student and bookstore employee. And the story is coming up in just a few moments back with this message from our sponsor. While studying art in college, Cara Ginser works part-time in the bookstore. After graduation, she found very few jobs for someone with her background.
So she continued at the store and hoped to find another part-time job to boost her income. One day, she was put in charge of a kid's story and craft workshop. She had to come up with some activities for the kids, and she'd recently read about paper beads. You make them by taking strips of paper, rolling them tight, and then sealing them shut to resemble jewelry beads.
It seemed like the perfect way to combine books and craft. Her hunch was right, and that got Cara thinking. Maybe she didn't actually need another part-time job. Maybe she could find a way to earn money on her own.
She loved making things, and she loved books. Paper bead jewelry could be the ideal combination. For the next few weeks, she honed the craft, eventually landing on a style she liked. She used those beads to make a few bracelets and posted them to her personal Facebook page.
Instantly, Cara had friends asking if she was selling them. She didn't know what to charge, so she came up with a price that seemed reasonable, which she now thinks was too cheap, and soon they were gone. She turned an idea into a product that people wanted, but now it was time to really get to work. Cara set aside the money from her first sales to buy supplies.
She wanted to purchase specific books, though she knew might sell well when converted to jewelry. For example, a fantasy reader might like something made from pages of the Hobbit, while a sci-fi fan would prefer Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Luckily, these start-up costs were low because one book could create hundreds of beads. She also bought jewelry string, paper backing for product labels, and a bag of lollipop sticks, the cheapest thing she could find to roll the beads.
Her total start-up costs were $70. With supplies and eagerness, it was time for the side hustle to unfold. Cara launched an Etsy store and called it Booked Creations. Now, as you may know, Etsy is a competitive marketplace, especially for jewelry, so she worked hard to optimize her products so people could find them.
That meant using effective product titles and descriptions to make sure her listings showed up in the search. Photos were important, too, and by her own account, so far Cara had taken awful ones. Luckily, Facebook offered a solution. This is pretty cool.
She joined a group called Let's Collab. Its purpose is to link up aspiring photographers with creators. The creators, or makers, or crafters, or crafters, whatever you want to call them, ship a photographer for their products. And in exchange for professional photos, the photographer gets to keep the products.
So it's a win-win. Now that she had optimized her listings and had professional photos, people began to notice. She was now charging a better price of around $24 per bracelet and making money. With the knowledge of what was actually selling, she felt comfortable spending a dollar or two per day on Etsy ads to boost the proven listings.
Sales increased, and booked was slowly becoming the side hustle of Cara's reams. That would be reams, you know, like reams or paper, okay? During that time, she also branched out and attended local craft fairs. It was there in person that she improved her skill of storytelling.
When passersby were checking out the jewelry, Cara was sure to inform them of her path to creating a book. The story tied a unique narrative to her products made them stand out from other items on sale and helped her sell more, sometimes up to $2,000 per fair. She took these selling lessons online as she began to build her online store. Over the following year, she encouraged to repeat customers directly from that store.
That's because Etsy fees had gone up, but more notably, as you may be aware, COVID-19 arrived and put all craft fairs on hold. These were a large source of income for her, so it's more important than ever that Cara built her own independent online brand. Booked to still making hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars per month. To keep that momentum going, she's creating more book-related products like button badges, earrings, and keychains.
It's just the beginning of Cara's paper bead story, but she's already on a terror. Got some words of wisdom for you from Cara? To close us out here, she says, always be open to learning and adapting. I have loved attending craft sales for as long as I can remember.
But when I decided I wanted to take books to those craft sales and sell, I started attending them with a different eye. I looked at what other sellers were doing, what worked, and what didn't. Pay attention to that, and then developed my process from there. Very good.
One suggestion I had for Cara and taking a look at her website, which is a great site, BookedCreations.com. That's Booked V-O-O-K-D, Creation.com. I'm going to link it up on the show notes page. I often mention how important it is to have a good about page.
I didn't actually find one on that site unless I missed it. I could have missed it, but since Cara has this really interesting story, and that story has worked so well at the craft fairs, I would encourage her to maybe focus a bit more on that and put that forward to build those relationships with customers and coming to your story, not the Etsy or whatever your third party platform is. So, wonderful project. Listeners, Inspiration is good, but Inspiration with Action is so much better.
Today's show notes, those aforementioned show notes with links to everything I mentioned are at www.sideusselschool.com-slash-1417. That is 1-4-1-7. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you'll come back.
Be sure you subscribe because much more is coming up. My name is Chris Goebo. This is sideusselschool. From the Onward Project.