All cases

This post is more musing than specifics. About what's working (a little), what isn't (almost everything), and what needs to change (that's the question). Plus: a ray of light.

A family workshop in a small Lithuanian town started out selling firewood and outdoor furniture sets locally – then found nearly all its international buyers through Etsy, growing from about 150 orders last year to 219 so far this year.

Roberta Perry turned a homemade sugar scrub into ScrubzBody, growing it for almost two decades into a business with 2,000 customers and a physical store – built on a weekly email newsletter and free publicity, not paid ads.

Yuliya Derbisheva makes every illustration and font entirely by hand, without AI – a deliberate stance in a market flooded with cheap AI-generated art – and has built her business by refusing to depend on any single platform to sell it.

After years running her own engineering firm, Evgeniya "Jeny" Guneva picked up glass art almost by accident – and one marketplace ended up carrying nearly all of her international sales: roughly 820 orders and €160,609 in revenue on her main Etsy shop alone.