She Grew Her First Instagram Following One Follow at a Time – Today It Drives 85% of Her Furniture Sales

Who: Safiye Ceren Akıllı
What: Design, build, restore, and hand-finish unique wooden furniture and home pieces
Format: local business · Turkey (Turkish); previously sold internationally to the United States via Etsy (English) – that shop is currently paused
Started: 2015 (working from home); company officially established in 2017
Audience: 65,800 Instagram followers
Payers: 3,000 buyers
Promotion budget: more than $100 per month
Income: yes, her main income
Status: active and growing
Channels: text social media, other

What worked: Instagram, built through years of organic, hands-on engagement plus modest paid ads (~$100/month) – about 85% of both her audience growth and customer acquisition.
The result: Grew to 65,800 followers and roughly 3,000 buyers; the business became her main income and, through separate B2B relationships, a supplier to some of Turkey’s largest furniture companies.
The catch: A major B2B partnership collapsed within months of a large upfront investment (TRY 200,000–300,000 in unpaid inventory and product development); international sales via Etsy remain limited by high shipping costs for large furniture.

I studied Foreign Trade and was working in logistics when I started thinking seriously about building something of my own. Ever since I was a child, I had wanted to have my own business one day. I also knew that I wanted it to involve making something with my hands, because I have always loved creating, designing, and turning an idea into something real.

In 2015, while I was still working at a private company, I became interested in restoring and painting old furniture. At the time, furniture painting was not yet very common in Turkey, and that was my first step into this world. Soon after, I started thinking about smaller wooden products that would be easier and less expensive to ship. I began designing and making decorative wooden signs and panels from home. There were very few businesses doing this kind of work in Turkey at the time.

For about a year and a half, I continued designing, making, and selling my products from home. Then, in 2017, I officially established my own company and opened my own shop. Alongside my handmade products, I began working more seriously with antique furniture restoration. In many ways, this brought me back to something that had been part of my life since childhood – my father was an antique dealer, so I had grown up in and around a furniture shop, even though I had never been professionally trained in the field.

Not long after I opened my own shop, I lost my father. He was deeply in love with his work. As a child, I had watched him in that world without fully understanding what it meant to him. He never got to see what Ahşap Hikayesi would eventually become. But as the years passed and my own connection with furniture grew deeper, I began to understand why he had loved this work so much.

I continued teaching myself – by trying, making mistakes, solving problems, researching, and learning through the work itself. Then the pandemic came, and it pushed me from restoration into furniture manufacturing, a shift described below.

Since then, Ahşap Hikayesi has become a business where I can work at both ends of the same craft: I can restore and give new life to an old or antique piece, and I can also take an idea, design a completely new piece of furniture from scratch, and manufacture it to a customer’s exact measurements and needs. Over these eleven years, I have learned an enormous amount, met thousands of customers, and eventually became a supplier to some of the largest companies in Turkey.

My first few customers came from a stand I opened at a local design market, where I sold my handmade products in person. For the first three or four months I had worked entirely from home, designing and making decorative wooden signs and panels; taking them to that market was my first real step outside the house.

Things changed quickly. I started selling almost immediately, and by my second month, the income from my wooden products had already exceeded my salary from my regular job. That was the moment I realized this could become much more than a side project, and I left my job to take the risk.

After that, my first roughly 100 customers came mainly through Instagram, as I started sharing my work and reaching people organically.

Instagram has been by far the most important channel for Ahşap Hikayesi. I opened the account in 2015, at the same time I started the business from home. In the beginning, I posted very frequently and tried to find people who were already interested in similar handmade and design content. I would follow or interact with people who seemed genuinely interested in this kind of work, simply to get them to discover my page. Many of them came back, followed the account, and some became customers. It was a very manual way of building an audience, but in the beginning it worked extremely well.

I gradually started experimenting with Instagram ads, initially with very small budgets. At that time, even a small amount of advertising could generate surprisingly good returns for me. By the time I opened my physical shop in 2017, the Instagram account had already grown to roughly 10,000–15,000 followers.

I only participated in a physical design market once – the one where I found my first customers. I never really needed to do another one, because after that Instagram was generating enough orders on its own. For many years, it functioned almost like my main storefront.

I still use Meta advertising today. I spend roughly $100 per month, so it has never been a huge advertising budget. Most of the growth of the business has come from consistently showing the work itself rather than from large paid campaigns. Today the Instagram audience is around 65,800 followers – by far our biggest source of both audience growth and customers, at about 85%.

There have also been some unexpected influencer mentions over the years. I have never paid an influencer to promote the business or given someone a product specifically in exchange for a post. A few influencers bought my furniture as regular paying customers and later chose to share it with their audiences. It was nice exposure, but I don’t think it had a major effect on the business. From my experience, influencer marketing may work differently for inexpensive, small products, but for larger, higher-priced furniture I haven’t seen it become an important acquisition channel.

Another channel has been B2B work. As the business grew, I began supplying larger companies in Turkey. That did bring additional business, although it worked differently from Instagram: it was less about building a public audience and more about larger business-to-business orders and professional relationships. At certain points, a significant part of my workload came through this side of the business.

I opened an Etsy shop in 2022 to test international sales and received around 10 orders, including orders from the United States. The biggest limitation was shipping – most of what I make is furniture or relatively large wooden pieces, and international shipping costs made it difficult to list a broad range of products competitively. I also experimented with Etsy Ads, but they didn’t produce particularly strong results; I think the problem was less Etsy itself and more the size and shipping economics of my products. The shop is currently paused, and I plan to reactivate it once I have pieces that are easier to ship internationally.

One of the strongest channels today isn’t really a platform at all: repeat customers and word of mouth. Customers who bought from me years ago still come back with new projects, and every month I receive orders either from previous customers or from people they have recommended me to. I would estimate that today around 40% of my business comes from repeat customers and referrals.

Looking back, the biggest lesson for me is that no collaboration, marketplace, or advertising trick has been as valuable as consistently showing my work and building trust over time. Instagram helped people discover me, but the quality of the work and the relationship with customers are what made many of them come back years later.

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The closest I came to losing the business was in 2020, when the pandemic began. At the time, restoration was a major part of what I did. I kept sharing before-and-after projects, restoration photos and videos, but demand almost disappeared. The slowdown was so severe that I reached a point where I was struggling even to pay the rent on my shop.

That was probably one of the moments when it would have been easiest to give up. Instead, I made one of the biggest and riskiest decisions in the history of the business: I bought woodworking machinery and moved from mainly restoring furniture into manufacturing it. I knew I couldn’t compete by making the same furniture everyone else was making, so I deliberately went in the opposite direction – designing pieces that were not meant to appeal to everyone, aimed at perhaps the 4–5% of customers who wanted something unusual and couldn’t find it anywhere else. That niche turned out to be enough. Within a few months, orders started coming in, and the business recovered.

Later, I learned a different kind of lesson when I entered B2B. One of my first major B2B partnerships was with Vivense, a large furniture retailer in Turkey. Moving from made-to-order production into that kind of relationship required a significant investment from a small business like mine – we developed many new products, paid for professional photography, and built inventory, something we normally didn’t do since our usual model was producing to order.

Only a few months after we joined the platform, the company began experiencing serious financial difficulties. Some of our payments remained outstanding, and the investment we had made specifically for that partnership looked like a major loss. Between inventory, product development, photography, and other preparation, we had invested roughly TRY 200,000–300,000 at the time – a very significant amount for a small independent manufacturer.

For a while, it felt as if all of that work and money had been wasted. But even that failure wasn’t completely wasted in the long run: years later, I was able to use the professional product photography and some of the work we had developed for that project when presenting Ahşap Hikayesi to another major company, which eventually helped me secure another supplier relationship. It taught me that sometimes an investment can fail for its original purpose and still become useful much later.

The hardest part overall, though, has been trying to build and maintain a manufacturing business in a very difficult economic environment. Costs can change rapidly, margins are under constant pressure, and as a small manufacturer you don’t have much room for mistakes. There have been periods when I worked 16-hour days simply to keep everything moving.

There have been several turning points, and interestingly, most of them came at moments when I had to make a decision without knowing whether it would work.

The first was very early, in 2015. I had been making wooden signs and decorative pieces from home for only a few months when I took them to a local design market. I started selling almost immediately, and by the second month, the income from my products had exceeded the salary from my full-time job. That was the first moment when something really clicked for me – I had proof that strangers were actually willing to pay for what I was creating. I left my job and committed to it full-time.

The second – and probably the most important – turning point came in 2020. The pandemic almost stopped my restoration business, and I reached a point where even paying the rent became difficult. Instead of closing the shop, I decided to completely change what the business could do: I bought woodworking machines, taught myself how to use them, and moved into furniture manufacturing. That decision changed Ahşap Hikayesi permanently.

Another important turning point was entering B2B manufacturing and eventually becoming a supplier to major companies in Turkey. For me, that was significant beyond the revenue – I had started at home making small wooden pieces without knowing how to operate a woodworking machine, and years later, companies much larger than mine were trusting us to manufacture products for them.

Most of my customers are women between roughly 25 and 60, generally from middle- to higher-income groups. But I think what defines them better than age or income is personality. They are usually people who don’t want their homes to look like everyone else’s. They like color, they enjoy unusual things, and they aren’t afraid to step outside what is considered standard.

Many of my products are personalized, hand-painted, and deliberately much more colorful and unconventional than what you would normally find from mainstream furniture brands. People aren’t necessarily coming to me because they simply need a table, cabinet, or console – they come because they want that piece to have character. I ship throughout Turkey, from east to west and north to south, and Instagram made that reach possible very early on.

The 65,800 people following the account obviously aren’t all customers, but the personality of the wider audience is quite similar to the people who buy. The difference is mostly purchasing power, especially now that I make larger and more expensive furniture. My B2B audience is somewhat different – those pieces are often positioned more like statement or collection pieces and reach a higher-income customer through larger companies – but even there, what makes my work interesting is usually the same thing: it doesn’t look like standard mass-market furniture.

My customers tend to be free-spirited people who love color and are brave enough to make room in their homes and lives for something different. That explains a lot about which growth channels worked for me. Instagram was a natural fit because the products are highly visual – people can immediately see the color, hand-painted details, and personality of a piece. Word of mouth also works extremely well, because people who connect with this style tend to know other people with similar tastes. Broader channels don’t necessarily perform as well, because I’m not trying to sell furniture to everyone.

I think my next stage of growth will be less about reaching the biggest possible audience and more about reaching the right people in new markets. After eleven years of building Ahşap Hikayesi in Turkey, I’m now planning to explore the European market and see how my designs and experience translate there.

I still believe strongly in Instagram and visual content, because my work is very visual – color, hand-painted details, transformations, and the production process are a big part of why people connect with it. I think showing the real making process through short videos will become even more important than polished advertising.

I’m less convinced by traditional influencer marketing, especially for large and relatively expensive products like furniture. Visibility doesn’t necessarily translate into sales, and I would rather reach a smaller audience of people who genuinely connect with my style.

I also want to approach international e-commerce differently. My experience with Etsy taught me that shipping large furniture internationally can be too expensive, so I’m interested in developing smaller, easier-to-ship pieces specifically for international customers, while keeping the same colorful, distinctive, and handmade character of Ahşap Hikayesi. I don’t think growth for me means becoming more mainstream – I want the brand to become even more distinctive, and to keep reaching the people who genuinely look for what I make.

Ahşap Hikayesi creates colorful, unconventional and highly personalized furniture for people who don’t want their homes to look like everyone else’s. From one-of-a-kind new pieces to antique restoration, everything is designed and made with craftsmanship, character and a little courage to be different.

Instagram: ahsap_hikayesi

LinkedIn: safiye-ceren-ak