Becoming Crafty Entrepreneurs: Our Journey with Cricut

This is a sponsored post written by me on behalf of Cricut. All opinions are 100% mine.

As lifelong crafters we’d often dream about turning our creative skills into a viable business. We’re grateful to Cricut for inviting us to share our journey to becoming entrepreneurs. It hasn’t been a straight road, but it has been rewarding and fun to follow our creative dreams along the way!

Dreaming of Becoming Entrepreneurs

Some of our favourite memories as kids include sharing time with our parents at their craft shop. Yep, they owned a small business called Woodpecker Crafts in which they sold beautiful, handmade wood creations.

As we grew older and the demands at their workplace increased our parents closed down their small business. But all this time we’ve had that entrepreneurial spirit within us and had imagined re-starting a craft shop.

Skipping ahead to about six years ago, Sonja and I found ourselves talking more and more about starting a business together. But what would it be? While our education, career fields and areas of expertise were quite different we both had the same shared passion for crafting and DIY.

So here we were interested in starting a business together but not quite knowing where to start. Around the same time Pinterest (follow us there!) was starting to take off and we were noticing that people were sharing their creations and crafts more and more. As lifelong “craftists”, we too believed we had ideas to share.

And hence, Sustain My Craft Habit was born!

Really by the seat of our pants, we figured out how to build a website, how to start a social media account and how to write DIY tutorials. But we quickly discovered a whole world of like-minded creative individuals to share our ideas with.

In those early stages, I think we would have been hard-pressed to consider ourselves as entrepreneurs. We were at that time simply making things that we loved and sharing them with the world.

However, we started to notice that people were asking some of the same questions over and over. And listening to these questions and the problems that our readers were having, is really what helped transform our hobby into a business.

Listening to our Customers

For example, once we started posting rock painting projects we noticed readers asking where they could find rocks to buy. This inspired us to open an Etsy shop and add beach stones to the product line.

Similarly, some of our coastal-inspired projects and crafts were getting more and more popular. So we experimented with selling the patterns for some of the crafts which we previously were offering for free on our blog.

After offering these patterns, people started asking whether we had SVG file versions available. We had seen some of our fellow blogging friends using their Cricut machines to make all sorts of gorgeous products. But we hadn’t had any experience with it ourselves. So we began experimenting with offering SVG files for our patterns.

Growing our Business with Cricut

Owning the Cricut Maker has been transformative in our business. We’ve previously written about the ways in which the Cricut Maker can support your small business.

But specifically, once we started offering the SVG files in our Etsy shop, sales grew! And this motivated us to keep creating new patterns.

Having the Cricut Maker to sample and test all our patterns and designs also saves a lot of time on development which we can reinvest back into our business. Our Etsy shop now has over 70 different designs and is growing.

Don’t get us wrong, we went through quite the learning curve and we’re still learning! But the one thing is that Cricut made using their products so simple and intuitive that we were really able to invest our energy on other things for our business.

Coming Full Circle

You might appreciate this irony: we now make and sell a number of wood (specifically driftwood) products in our Etsy shop. It’s like Woodpecker Crafts has finally been reborn!

And the best part? Our parents also are a part of the business – they make the beautiful tabletop driftwood trees which we offer in our shop! You can learn how to make your own elegant debossed product tags using the Cricut Maker.

Looking Forward in our Creative Business

It has been about five and a half years now since we started Sustain My Craft Habit. In that time, it has become a multi-dimensional business with the blog, YouTube channel, Etsy shop, commissioned work and more.

As with crafting, we see it as weaving together a solid business to make something beautiful. It has taken time, patience, learning and adapting along the way. But it is so worthwhile to be crafting a life of dreams every day.

We’re happy to share with you this free SVG file which you can use to make a mug, tshirt or simply hang on the wall. We hope it inspires you to craft the life of your dreams and remember that being an entrepreneur is an ever-evolving journey!

And if you’re stuck for inspiration, we have a collection of over 20 Cricut crafts to make and sell as well as Cricut projects for beginners.

Thank you so much to Cricut for support and helping to enable our creative dreams and business.

We’re happy to answer any questions you might have about starting your own entrepreneurial journey. Just leave them in the comments below or send us an email!

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