Owning my own .com is amazing! Not the Etsy version of .com, I mean, owning my actual domain! When I left the Etsy world, I felt a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders. I wasn’t growing past my full potential. I built that shop from the ground up by myself over a 4 year time frame and had over 700 listings. I had repeat customers and customers who have become friends but as time went on, I felt stagnant. There was nowhere to go except paying more fees to advertise more, without really knowing if my money was being spent to benefit my business or to benefit Etsy as a whole.
I took a few days and really reevaluated my true wants and had deep conversations with my husband about the direction we wanted to take our business. I googled all kinds of stuff over those few days and really felt deep down, that leaving Etsy was the best thing that had ever happened to my shop! It allowed me to rebrand and relist. I was overwhelmed at first but really all I could do was take some deep breaths and just do it! JUST DO IT!
We came up with lots of new names! My old shop name was HoneyBird Design. While doing my research, I googled HoneyBird to see what would come up and a shop had added an S to the end of Design. There was a HoneyBird soaps, HoneyBird marijuana, HoneyBird stationary and the list goes on. It wasn’t original anymore. We have 3 daughters and came up with all the different combinations of Sisters and Daughters and then after googling all of those name combinations, they had all been taken. So I took a step back and visited a few of my favorite shops and looked at details of their websites and things I liked about them. One thing most of them had in common was the type of name they had branded. We decided to use our youngest daughters name. Georgia Tisdale. georgiatisdale.com It has a certain sophistication to it and we loved it! So after naming the shop, which looking back now, was probably the hardest part, it was time to really get started!
I dove in! Head first! I got that spark in my heart and fire deep down to just learn it and do it! I did it all myself, one YouTube video after another, one more how-to video after another, one more blog post reading after another and I got it done! I decided to go with Shopify as the platform. Learning the foundation of Shopify was so smooth. They have a chat feature on hand that is amazing and at the end of the chat they email you the chat log so you can file it away and go back to it later! I knew I made the right choice after my first chat! I have so much more to do but I am really enjoying the new website and design!
Oh my gosh, rebranding a business and stocking a full inventory is expensive. For this shop, we have a full inventory stocked instead of ordering as we go! But I can’t hold a full inventory of every single color option so we have a select few seasonal colors and the trending colors for now! More on that at georgiatisdale.com – that’s right, the shop has it’s own blog page!
If I could go back and do it over again, I would have had both shops open simultaneously for a few months. At the time, I felt the need to just leave Etsy. I had had enough. I would highly recommend that any shop on Etsy, uses Etsy as a backup plan, rather than their only plan. Download your CSV files and get your domain, it’s very inexpensive, about $15 a year to own your own name! You can own it and not use it at the same time, but I can promise you that you will eventually want to! I own several domains and they all get directed to my website! Now that I’ve made the switch, I wish I would have listened to my husband years ago on importing my Etsy shop to Shopify! But shhhh.. don’t tell him he was right!!
