A One-Person Workshop in Estonia Has Sold About €10,000 on Etsy in Eight Years – and He Keeps Going Anyway

Who: Krister Tonsiver
What: Handcrafted objects from curly birch – from serving boards to playful, unconventional functional art
Format: physical product · based in Estonia, selling internationally (mainly US, Japan, Europe)
Started: 2018
Audience: around 500 (Instagram followers and Etsy favorites)
Payers: roughly €10,000 in total Etsy sales over the period – uneven, with months over €1,000 followed by stretches of three months with almost nothing
Promotion budget: $0
Income: side project
Status: active, but not steadily growing
Channels: search & AI traffic

What worked: Etsy search – putting a very niche product in front of someone thousands of kilometres away who was already looking for something unusual. The unusual product itself became the marketing.
The result: About €10,000 in total sales over eight years – marginal as a living, uneven month to month.
The catch: Social media and paid promotion never paid off; Etsy conversion has sat around 0.3%. This is a story about why someone keeps making things that don't really pay – not a growth playbook.

I'm Krister Tonsiver, based in Estonia. Woodworking was never supposed to become a conventional business for me. I became fascinated by Masur birch – an exceptionally rare figured form of birch found mainly in Northern Europe. Every piece is different, and sometimes you don't really know what is hidden inside until you cut into it.

In 2018 I brought an old log building from 1924 back to life as my workshop. The building itself had spent around 70 years being used mainly for storage, and I liked the idea of making things again in a place that had already lived a long life.

That became Warenoff. I started making one-off objects rather than trying to manufacture identical products: serving and cutting boards, trays, kitchen objects, jewellery and occasionally things inspired by old tools. I'm particularly drawn to worn tools because somebody worked with them before me. You can see the marks of their hands and work, even though you usually have no idea who they were.

The challenge from the beginning was simple: how does a tiny workshop in Estonia find the handful of people around the world who understand why an unusual piece of wood and hours of handwork are worth paying for?

My first customers came mainly through Etsy. I didn't start with an existing audience or a large advertising budget – I relied on people discovering unusual products through Etsy search. The first sales were slow, but gradually reviews, previous sales and a wider product range created more trust. Later, my own website, Google search and social media added other ways for people to discover Warenoff.

Etsy has been the most important channel. It solved a problem I could never solve efficiently on my own: putting a very niche product made in Estonia in front of someone thousands of kilometres away who was already searching for something unusual.

Search has worked better than trying to manufacture attention. Product photography, Etsy SEO, experimenting with titles and keywords, and gradually learning which products people actually respond to have mattered more than simply posting more content.

My own website has also helped, particularly through Google, because Masur birch is unusual enough that people actively search for information about the material itself. Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and later TikTok have all been experiments in creating awareness, but none has replaced Etsy as the main commercial channel.

One lesson has been that unusual products themselves can be a marketing channel. Something people have not seen before gives them a reason to stop, click, share or ask a question. That idea eventually led me to a much more radical experiment: NOKUArt.

None of this has added up to a story of exponential growth – quite the opposite. Over the years I've experimented with quite a few product categories – urns, wall décor and other wooden objects – trying to understand what people respond to and what makes sense for me to make. At the moment I've narrowed the focus mainly to serving and cutting boards. In total, I've sold roughly €10,000 worth of products through Etsy. If I had to make a living from it, those numbers would still be very marginal. Sales have also been extremely uneven: months with more than €1,000, followed by stretches of three months with virtually nothing.

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A lot has not worked. Social media is probably the clearest example. It is very easy to spend hours making photographs, posts and videos and receive almost no meaningful reach, let alone sales. I've had posts where practically all the initial engagement came from my own accounts.

Paid promotion has not been a magic solution either. For a niche handmade product, buying traffic can become expensive very quickly, while conversion remains low. At times my Etsy conversion rate has been around 0.3%, which forces you to question everything – the product, price, photographs, audience and even whether the business makes sense.

I have also made products I personally loved that the market simply did not care about. That is one of the difficult things about being both the maker and the seller: craftsmanship can make you emotionally attached to an object, while the customer owes that object absolutely nothing.

There is an old joke among woodworkers that you spend €5,000 on machinery, €500 on materials, and then sell what you made for €50. In my case it may actually be worse, because the curly birch I work with comes partly from plantations I've established myself – and growing your own rare figured wood is definitely not a cheap hobby.

I've considered changing direction many times. Instead of quitting woodworking, however, I increasingly started questioning the safer approach to the products and marketing.

There wasn't one dramatic turning point. It was more a gradual realization that craftsmanship alone doesn't create attention.

I could spend days making an object from an extraordinary piece of wood, photograph it carefully and put it online – and almost nobody would see it. Meanwhile, something visually surprising could make people stop instantly.

That eventually gave me the idea for NOKUArt. Instead of fighting for attention after making the product, why not make attention part of the product itself? The craftsmanship and rare wood remain serious, but the shapes are humorous, provocative and difficult to ignore.

NOKUArt is brand new, so I don't yet know whether the experiment will work. In a way, that uncertainty is the interesting part.

Warenoff's audience is not really defined by age or geography. The common denominator is people who value things that are difficult to reproduce – natural materials, visible craftsmanship and objects with some character and story behind them.

Many customers are in the US, Japan and Europe, although I've shipped pieces much further. They are generally not looking for the cheapest serving board or kitchen object. They are looking for something they are unlikely to see in somebody else's home.

With NOKUArt I'm deliberately testing a different and potentially much broader audience: people attracted first by humour and visual surprise, who then discover that the joke is actually a carefully handmade object from an unusual material.

I think the next year will be less about producing more and more about becoming easier to notice.

The internet is increasingly saturated with technically good products, photographs and now AI-generated content. For a small maker, simply being “beautiful” or “high quality” is becoming less of a differentiator.

My bet is on distinctiveness: fewer products with stronger identities, better storytelling, and objects that people remember after scrolling past hundreds of others.

Warenoff will continue around rare wood and one-off craftsmanship. NOKUArt is the more experimental side of that idea – testing whether humour, surprise and craftsmanship can create organic attention that would otherwise have to be bought with advertising.

Website: warenoff.com

Etsy: Warenoff

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