Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / From Recess Monitor to Top-Rated Etsy Seller: Kira Hartley Klinger's Accidental Empire

Transcript

From Recess Monitor to Top-Rated Etsy Seller: Kira Hartley Klinger's Accidental Empire · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  Foreign.
• 0:05
  Hartley Klinger, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:08
  Thank you, Dave.
• 0:09
  Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time to be here.
• 0:11
  So, Kira, you've had a long, strange trip as an entrepreneur.
• 0:15
  It seems learning about your background, you started off accidentally with no business experience.
• 0:21
  You taught yourself this, this auction war type business in a very competitive industry.
• 0:26
  And you've built a couple very successful stores with which has turned into writing books, becoming a speaker, a bunch of other stuff.
• 0:34
  So I'd love to hear how it all unfolded.
• 0:37
  So, just to set the stage for our listeners, can you talk about your backstory and how you got started as an entrepreneur?
• 0:43
  Yeah, completely accidentally.
• 0:45
  Like you said, I married very young.
• 0:48
  I dedicated a lot of my time when I was younger to raising my kids.
• 0:53
  I did a lot of side hustling, anything that I could do to help bring money in.
• 0:57
  I divorced when I was 40 and I still had one child left that I was raising.
• 1:01
  And I didn't have a whole lot of experience in anything really.
• 1:06
  Um, I didn't go to college.
• 1:08
  I didn't.
• 1:09
  I.
• 1:09
  I've never been a clock puncher.
• 1:11
  I, I had my own thing.
• 1:13
  I would clean houses or I would write resumes for people.
• 1:16
  You know, very briefly.
• 1:17
  I was a recess monitor on the playground for the school.
• 1:21
  That was my last side gig when I decided to try my hand at having my own business.
• 1:26
  So when I got divorced, you know, I had all these options, you know, and a lot of people were saying, well, you should really go back to school.
• 1:33
  It's easier said than done.
• 1:35
  Going back to school takes money, takes time.
• 1:37
  I'm still raising a kid here, you know, I needed to make money, and I could have gone and gotten the, quote, reliable job, gone to a factory, put in a lot of overtime, whatever it took.
• 1:47
  But I had this hobby that I'd started a few years ago with friends, just a social thing where I would buy things at auctions and estate sales and see whether or not I could sell it for more money.
• 1:59
  Ebay was kind of new.
• 2:00
  It was exciting, it was fun, and I'd make money sometimes.
• 2:03
  So I just kind of leaned on that.
• 2:05
  And that was.
• 2:06
  Yeah, that was the choice that I decided to make.
• 2:09
  I thought, you know what?
• 2:10
  I'm just going to see if I can do it.
• 2:11
  Why not?
• 2:12
  What do I have to lose?
• 2:13
  Okay, all right, so you have a little bit of experience with this hobby, you've made some money with it, and now you're looking for something full time, and you really need to support yourself post time divorce.
• 2:23
  So you, you didn't want to go do the factory thing or, or go back to school or anything like that.
• 2:28
  So you decide you're going to do this.
• 2:30
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• 3:13
  I kept the job at the school.
• 3:15
  You know, I had to have, I had to have some, some money coming in.
• 3:19
  And I just started to go to the sales more often.
• 3:22
  Instead of going on Friday nights, I went to sales several times a week.
• 3:26
  You know, my job at the school was only part time, so I could go in the afternoon, I could go on the weekends.
• 3:32
  My daughter had games in the evenings.
• 3:34
  So I could work around that, I could work around schedules.
• 3:37
  So it was nice.
• 3:38
  But I just stepped it up.
• 3:39
  I started buying more and I didn't have a lot of money to spend, so I would wait for the things that nobody wanted.
• 3:45
  I would buy the things that were in the backyard, not on the collectible table or.
• 3:50
  Yeah, a lot of times I'd wait to the end and scoop up whatever was left, bring it home, see if there was anything there that was worth money.
• 3:57
  Maybe something that I paid $2 for would sell for $50 and then I could turn that into the next auction.
• 4:03
  And I just kept rolling the money over and over again.
• 4:06
  There really wasn't an opportunity to save money at that point.
• 4:10
  It was constantly rolling it over into more inventory and paying bills and taking what was left and buying more inventory and paying bills.
• 4:17
  You know, it just was this constant circle.
• 4:21
  You know, I didn't, I didn't quit my side job until I think I was four years in.
• 4:27
  And the biggest reason why I quit the side job was because I actually met somebody else.
• 4:35
  My daughter graduated from high school and I decided that I was going to start this second chapter in my life.
• 4:41
  And so I moved away.
• 4:42
  And I told myself at that point, you know what, no more side jobs.
• 4:45
  It's, it's all in, it's all or nothing at this point.
• 4:48
  And so that's what I did.
• 4:50
  I just took it from there.
• 4:51
  Okay, all right, so you're start, you know, really dedicating more time to this, like you said, you start rolling the money in, gradually building this, and then about four years in, you're at a crossroads, you meet someone else,
• 5:05
  you're.
• 5:05
  You're gonna move away, so you can't do the school job anymore, and you decide to really go all in with this business that you've had consistently for four years.
• 5:13
  So you've got customers, you've got experience, you're generating income.
• 5:18
  So when you make that to go all in and really dedicate all your time to this business, how did that change things?
• 5:25
  For one?
• 5:26
  Eventually a second shock came around.
• 5:28
  I'm kind of, kind of all over the place in what I buy and sell.
• 5:31
  There's a lot of people out there that specialize in one thing or another.
• 5:35
  Maybe they buy record albums, or maybe they buy jewelry or coins, whatever.
• 5:41
  I came into it not knowing anything about anything.
• 5:44
  So I was game to try everything.
• 5:46
  And I learned a lot along the way just by experimenting with, with buying and selling things that were cheap, things I got my hands on.
• 5:54
  So I kind of created my own niche in this, in this market.
• 5:58
  I didn't follow any trends.
• 6:00
  I didn't chase after the things that everybody else was chasing after.
• 6:03
  So that kind of became, you know, I didn't have the desire, even when I had more money, I didn't have the desire to suddenly pick a lane.
• 6:09
  I wanted to keep being able to buy and sell anything and everything.
• 6:13
  Sometimes you go to an auction and you think one thing is going to be there, and if it's not, what do you do then?
• 6:18
  Do you go home?
• 6:19
  I like to be able to look around and say, okay, well, that didn't pan out.
• 6:23
  But they have this here, and this I know is worth money.
• 6:26
  This will make this day worth my trip.
• 6:29
  So what happened was that one of the things that I was buying and selling quite a bit of was fabric, of all things.
• 6:35
  I discovered that there was a market out there for vintage and out of print fabric.
• 6:41
  It started to get a little bit congested on my ebay site for the people that were coming just to find fabric.
• 6:47
  It didn't really look a whole lot like I knew what I was doing because maybe I was selling fabric, but then, oh, maybe I was selling hubcaps for a car.
• 6:55
  Oh, well, maybe I was selling, you know, it could be anything.
• 6:58
  So at that point I was getting all this return business for the fabric that I felt like it was time to pull the fabric off of ebay and take another plunge and open a brand new shop on ETSY
• 7:09
  with zero followers, zero customers, just, it's basically starting all over again.
• 7:15
  Here I am, I sell fabric.
• 7:16
  And so that shop opened up eight years after I opened the ebay shop.
• 7:22
  Yeah, I don't worry now about being able to make money off of what I buy.
• 7:27
  I know that I can walk into any situation and that I can pick up things that I'm going to make money.
• 7:31
  So I'm beyond that point.
• 7:33
  Both of my shops are established, I have regular customers.
• 7:37
  I know I'm going to have business.
• 7:39
  Unless, you know, heaven forbid, the Internet shuts down.
• 7:43
  Okay.
• 7:43
  And I'm just looking at you, I'm looking at your Etsy store right now.
• 7:48
  So it says you've been on for 11 years, you've got 18,000 sales and you've got over 5,000 five star reviews.
• 7:56
  Okay, I bet, I bet.
• 8:00
  Because reviews aren't, aren't, you know, easy to come by, it seems, in any capacity, whether it's Google or, you know, even what I experienced with the podcasting.
• 8:09
  So reviews are very important.
• 8:10
  So when you started this, right, like you said, you kind of built this from scratch.
• 8:15
  You figured out what to do, you just kind of kept experimenting.
• 8:19
  You wanted to have the freedom to buy and sell what you want.
• 8:21
  And so Etsy is more, I guess, a more established place to sell fabric, Is that right?
• 8:26
  It's a different community.
• 8:27
  When I was on ebay, another thing that happened, a lot of fabric started to come in from other countries, most notably China.
• 8:35
  And you know, our government has a really old agreement with the Chinese government where China pays X amount of dollars to the United States annually and their citizens can ship for free to the United States.
• 8:52
  Now this agreement is old.
• 8:54
  It came out before the Internet.
• 8:56
  So it was meant to promote more mail, like communication between people.
• 9:01
  But when the Internet started, an E commerce started.
• 9:06
  You know, this, this requirement was good for anything that weighed up to a pound.
• 9:11
  There's an awful lot of things out there that people sell that weighs less than a pound, fabric among them.
• 9:17
  So China was selling fabric on ebay and they could ship it for free and they could also sell the fabric for cheaper because it's from China.
• 9:27
  Everything that comes from China is cheaper.
• 9:29
  And I was a specialty shop.
• 9:30
  I was selling estate fabric, I was selling vintage fabric, I was selling out of print fabric.
• 9:34
  I was selling the made in the United States.
• 9:36
  Once upon a time, Fab break.
• 9:38
  I wasn't standing out anymore on ebay.
• 9:40
  I was getting swallowed up by this new wave of industry, if you will.
• 9:45
  And so Etsy is a bigger Community of actual crafters and actual quilters and actual creators.
• 9:53
  And it really opened up this channel to actually talk to people.
• 9:57
  I know way more people on a personal level through Etsy than I ever have on ebay.
• 10:02
  It's just a really different environment.
• 10:05
  Okay, all right.
• 10:06
  So when you get in there, right, and you decide you're gonna do this, you didn't really know what to expect, but you wanted to go a different direction.
• 10:12
  So how did.
• 10:13
  How did you build the store up to the level it is now over all those years?
• 10:18
  By being different.
• 10:19
  And I didn't really know that I was setting out necessarily to be different.
• 10:24
  But the thing that I have been, longer than anything in my life, has been a writer in one way or another.
• 10:30
  I've been writing since I was a kid.
• 10:32
  It was what I always wanted to do.
• 10:33
  It was something I tried for many, many years.
• 10:35
  I had little publications here and there.
• 10:37
  You know, single parents can't make a go with writing.
• 10:41
  I couldn't.
• 10:42
  Most.
• 10:43
  Most writers can't make a go with just writing.
• 10:45
  It's hard.
• 10:46
  It doesn't pay very well.
• 10:47
  So I gave it up.
• 10:48
  But when I started to do Etsy, then I started to go to these estate sales specifically looking for fabric.
• 10:56
  Then I started to meet the people that went with the fabric as well.
• 10:59
  I started to meet the families of the person who had passed away, who once owned this fabric.
• 11:05
  You know, I started to deal with the same competition for fabric.
• 11:09
  So I would get to know the characters, and there'd be bidding wars.
• 11:12
  You know, I got to know a lot of auctioneers.
• 11:15
  And so there were all of these great little stories that were coming out of my experiences in buying and selling fabric.
• 11:20
  A lot of them were very funny.
• 11:22
  A lot of them were heartfelt and serious.
• 11:25
  So I just started to write these essays as part of my description.
• 11:28
  When I was describing the fabric, I'd say, you know, this is where I found the fabric.
• 11:32
  This is what happened at the sale.
• 11:33
  This is who owned the fabric.
• 11:35
  Just a couple paragraphs, nothing big.
• 11:37
  But people started to resonate with that.
• 11:39
  It started to put a face to the fabric instead of.
• 11:42
  You know, today we deal with so much AI.
• 11:44
  When you look on the Internet for something for sale, you can tell if it was written by a bot.
• 11:50
  It's unflavorful.
• 11:51
  It's.
• 11:52
  There's no color to it.
• 11:53
  It's just.
• 11:54
  It's just there.
• 11:55
  You can pick it out a mile away.
• 11:56
  You can also pick out a mile away if there's a person behind what they're selling.
• 12:01
  And so that really started to resonate with the people on Etsy.
• 12:06
  And they started to write in.
• 12:07
  They started to tell me how much they appreciated the stories, how much they enjoy knowing where this piece had come from that's going to go into their project now.
• 12:17
  And it just, yeah, it was fascinating.
• 12:20
  And it wasn't long before a lot of my customers started to ask me to write full length books with the.
• 12:27
  Okay, all right, and then you've written several books.
• 12:30
  So how did that actually come about?
• 12:32
  Once you decided that you wanted to write a book, how'd you go about that process?
• 12:36
  As I mentioned, I tried to write for a lot of years and I spent at least a decade in the traditional publishing circuit.
• 12:45
  Gosh, that was back in my 20s and my 30s.
• 12:48
  So we're talking like the 1990s.
• 12:51
  And it just wasn't, it wasn't really a route at 50.
• 12:54
  I was 55 at this point.
• 12:55
  I didn't, I didn't want to go that route again.
• 12:57
  I didn't want to invest that kind of time again.
• 13:01
  And I also kind of felt like that I had my audience already, you know, that my customers had reached out.
• 13:06
  I'm like, I already know who's going to buy my book and they're right here in my shop.
• 13:09
  So I decided I was going to publish it myself.
• 13:11
  And again, this was something that I have no experience in.
• 13:15
  None.
• 13:15
  I wasn't in the financial position even three years ago that I am today.
• 13:21
  Today, today I'm debt free.
• 13:22
  But three years ago, you know, we were still working on this house and still paying everyday bills and we just weren't.
• 13:28
  So I didn't want to invest a lot of money into trying to self publish the book either.
• 13:33
  So it's like, okay, well, I'll figure this out too.
• 13:36
  And one of the beautiful things about the Internet is that you literally can learn anything on the Internet.
• 13:42
  And so I did, I pulled up some great step by step tutorials on how to format your own book for Amazon, for kdp, for those sorts of things.
• 13:51
  I did hire somebody on Fiverr to format my cover for a whopping $75.
• 13:58
  And that's all the money that I had into producing the first book.
• 14:02
  You know, my best friend is a painter.
• 14:04
  She stepped up.
• 14:05
  She says, I want to do the covers.
• 14:06
  So she painted the artwork.
• 14:07
  And I just had to hire somebody to match the artwork with a title and, you know, put it all together.
• 14:13
  Okay, all right.
• 14:14
  And so like, you didn't really know what to do.
• 14:17
  You just started learning how to do it.
• 14:18
  And going through the steps and figuring it out.
• 14:20
  And so when you finally get this done after.
• 14:23
  After that process, what was the response to the book?
• 14:26
  So I knew that I was going to have to take my book to the people.
• 14:29
  You know, one thing about self publishing is that you don't have all of the marketing that a traditional publisher is going to do for you.
• 14:37
  But traditional publishing doesn't get you off the hook for marketing.
• 14:41
  E.
• 14:42
  The more you push your book, the more books you're going to sell.
• 14:45
  And places like Amazon don't sell books.
• 14:48
  Amazon is a hub.
• 14:49
  It's a hub.
• 14:50
  It's a place for me to buy my own books.
• 14:53
  Not that I haven't sold books on Amazon.
• 14:55
  I do.
• 14:56
  I sell them all the time.
• 14:57
  And weirdly enough, I sell a lot of books in Japan, which is just.
• 15:00
  It's fun to me.
• 15:02
  Anyway, I knew that I had to do the work in order to find my audience.
• 15:06
  I already knew that I had customers on Etsy.
• 15:08
  So the natural thing to do was to print out these notes.
• 15:13
  Hey, I wrote the book.
• 15:15
  You guys asked for it.
• 15:16
  Here it is.
• 15:16
  It's finally published.
• 15:18
  You can pick it up on Amazon.
• 15:20
  You can buy it here in my shop.
• 15:21
  I can sign it for you.
• 15:23
  You know, just a note letting them know about my package or my book.
• 15:27
  And so every package that went into the mail got one of these notes.
• 15:32
  So it was free advertising, you know.
• 15:34
  And so the next thing that I knew that I needed to do was actually take it to the people.
• 15:39
  So I thought to myself, okay, well, who likes fabric quilters?
• 15:42
  Like, fabric quilters have meetings.
• 15:44
  They have clubs.
• 15:45
  They're called quilting guilds, and they have guest speakers.
• 15:48
  So I started to email a bunch of quilting guilds inviting myself to be a guest speaker.
• 15:53
  Hey, this is who I am.
• 15:55
  I've written a book.
• 15:56
  You know, I can bring a fabric shop.
• 15:57
  I can do some tutorials as part of my speech.
• 16:00
  This is what I can offer to you.
• 16:02
  And I started to get hired to do gigs, you know, and initially I didn't.
• 16:06
  I didn't charge them.
• 16:07
  I did it for free because I wanted to get my name out there so they would pay me mileage.
• 16:12
  Now I make a fee.
• 16:13
  Now I make a baker's fee, and I get mileage and I sell books.
• 16:17
  And, yeah, I get paid to sell my books.
• 16:20
  So it's pretty.
• 16:21
  It's pretty cool.
• 16:21
  Wow.
• 16:22
  Okay, so for something that you started on accident, right?
• 16:26
  And you built up this shop.
• 16:29
  Another question, too, before I get to that was there as you're Scaling these different shops too.
• 16:33
  Was there ever a point where, you know, things were looking like you might not make it and you thought, thought about giving up?
• 16:40
  Not once.
• 16:41
  Not once I moved away and decided this was going to be my gig.
• 16:45
  There were.
• 16:46
  There were some hard times in that first four years.
• 16:49
  And there were definitely some days when I wondered whether or not I was going to be able to keep going with it.
• 16:54
  I never really thought about going and getting a different job though, because the money that I was making, even if sporadically, was still better than the money that I would have made going and getting a job at a
• 17:06
  factory.
• 17:06
  I didn't, you know, I could have worked my way up, but I didn't have any job training, you know, so I felt like I was going to be starting at the bottom no matter where I went.
• 17:16
  So, yeah, so I just kept looking for the next bigger score to keep me going.
• 17:21
  Okay.
• 17:21
  And when you look at how that involved where you started on accident, you just took the messy action, you kept going, you figured things out, you were writing the stories.
• 17:31
  Cause that's what your passion was.
• 17:33
  Yeah.
• 17:34
  You had demand from your audience for a book.
• 17:36
  You wrote the book, figured out how to do that.
• 17:39
  You basically invited and became a speaker at all these different guilds and turned into a paid speaker.
• 17:45
  So when you look at all that, what's the most important lesson that you've taken from this journey?
• 17:50
  Can't say that I ever lacked confidence.
• 17:53
  I don't really think that that was a problem.
• 17:55
  I did have a lot of fears that I had to overcome.
• 17:58
  I was always terrified of speaking in public and I had to work on that.
• 18:03
  You know, I knew that if I wanted to be successful, I knew because it's easy to have an E commerce shop and to be behind the screen and not really have to conversate with people in person.
• 18:11
  But as things escalated, it's like, okay, you know, if I want this thing to grow to scale, then I have to step up and I have to get over some of these things, you know, and it's getting over.
• 18:22
  The fear of public speaking is not as simple as just waking up one day.
• 18:26
  Well, I'm just not going to be afraid anymore.
• 18:28
  I'm not going to let it affect me anymore.
• 18:30
  It took practice.
• 18:31
  And one of the early things that I did and this was in promoting the Etsy shop.
• 18:37
  I would do Instagram videos.
• 18:38
  I would do Instagram videos about how to burn test fabric or identifying vintage fabric.
• 18:44
  You know, little lessons, things that I felt confident about and knew things about.
• 18:48
  And the Beauty of that is that you can try again and try again and try again until you're somewhat happy with it, you know, and then.
• 18:54
  And then put it out there.
• 18:55
  And the more videos that I created, the easier it became.
• 18:59
  And I think that is true with all of this.
• 19:02
  The more steps that I.
• 19:04
  I took, the easier the next steps became.
• 19:07
  It.
• 19:07
  It just gotta keep moving forward.
• 19:09
  Yeah.
• 19:10
  It took a lot of pushing and a lot of courageous moments, and.
• 19:14
  And I look back on some of my earlier Instagram videos.
• 19:17
  I'm like, how do I get those off of there?
• 19:18
  Because they're terrible.
• 19:20
  It's like they're there for eternity.
• 19:22
  So the only thing I could do is kind of either redo it, kind of make fun of myself.
• 19:26
  But, yeah, it's all a learning curve.
• 19:28
  Okay.
• 19:29
  All right.
• 19:29
  And looking back at this journey and how far you've come and all these different things you've tried and learned and done, what's been the best part of it for you?
• 19:37
  Best part about it?
• 19:38
  And people say this all the time.
• 19:39
  You know, you're so lucky.
• 19:40
  You work for yourself.
• 19:41
  You can do whatever you want to do.
• 19:43
  You don't have to go to work if you don't want to.
• 19:45
  Well, that's.
• 19:45
  That's not.
• 19:46
  That part's not true.
• 19:47
  If you don't put in the work, obviously you're not going to have a business.
• 19:51
  But I do like the freedom of choice and the freedom of being able to make my.
• 19:56
  My own schedule.
• 19:57
  I have always been a really, really lousy clock puncher.
• 20:01
  The little bit of time that I.
• 20:02
  That I was one of those, I failed miserably at it.
• 20:06
  So I'm just never on time.
• 20:08
  So being able to have the freedom to plan my day, to say, oh, I'm going to go to a sale today, or, oh, it's a beautiful day outside.
• 20:15
  I'm gonna work in the garden.
• 20:16
  Or you know what?
• 20:17
  I'm not working at all this weekend.
• 20:18
  The grandkids are coming.
• 20:19
  That is a luxury that I never, ever want to give back.
• 20:22
  Okay.
• 20:23
  All right.
• 20:23
  And Kira, if people are seeing this, they wa.
• 20:25
  Learn more about maybe your fabric shops or check your books out or.
• 20:29
  Or just get in touch for any other reason.
• 20:30
  What's the best way people can find you online?
• 20:32
  If it is a fabric person out there or a textile person and you want to connect on that level, find me in my Etsy shop, which is dot oddity.
• 20:43
  I'm pretty good about getting back on social media.
• 20:46
  Not as good as I could be, but, you know, you can only do so many things at once.
• 20:50
  So there's, there's Instagram page that's also under Dot Oddity.
• 20:55
  I have a Facebook author page under Kira Hartley Klinger.
• 20:58
  LinkedIn on Kyra Hartley Klinger.
• 21:00
  Yeah.
• 21:01
  Drop me a message and I'll message a message back.
• 21:04
  Now, part of being that top rated seller on Etsy means I have to respond within 24 hours to every single message.
• 21:10
  So if you're just not reaching me, message me on Etsy and I'll get back to you because I'll lose my rating.
• 21:16
  Okay.
• 21:17
  There you go.
• 21:18
  There you go.
• 21:18
  All right.
• 21:19
  Well, Kira, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 21:25
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 21:26
  Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 21:27
  It was fun.
• 21:27
  All right.