Bonus: $3500 Per Day Selling Custom Prints On Etsy With Luke Emery

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You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the show where I on successful bootstrap business owners and delve deeply into how they started their online businesses. And today is a very special bonus episode because I want to introduce you to my buddy Nick Loper. Nick runs the Side Hustle Show where he interviews entrepreneurs on how they started and grew their successful online businesses. And in fact, his show is a lot like mine. It’s one of my favorites and you should definitely check it out over at the Side Hustle Show.

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He also runs a popular blog over at sidehustlenation.com as well. Anyway, what you’re about to hear today is a full episode of Nick’s podcast where he interviews Luke Emery, an entrepreneur who makes $3,500 per day selling custom prints on Etsy. It’s a great episode and it just goes to show that with the right product, you can make a pretty good living selling on Etsy. So enjoy this episode with Nick of The Side Hustle Show.

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Right now, processing, pretty much the average is like $3,500 a day, which is insane.

01:13
What’s up, what’s up, Nick Loper here. Welcome to the side hustle show because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. That was Luke Emery that you just heard describing the sales volume for his new print on demand e-commerce business called VanWoof.com. Through that site and through the VanWoof Etsy shop, Luke sells these custom pet portraits that are done in the style to look like a real oil painting of your fur babies.

01:40
Luke also co-hosts the Lockdown Livelihood podcast, and what’s crazy is this whole business started as an on-air challenge just six months ago. So yes, from zero to thousands of dollars in sales a day in a very short period of time. Stick around in this one to learn how Luke has marketed these paintings, how the fulfillment and logistics work, and how you might be able to use some of the same tools and platforms to follow a similar path.

02:07
Notes and links for this one along with the full text summary with all of Luke’s top tips from the call are at sidehouseownation.com slash Luke. Now, to be fair, Van Wolf isn’t Luke’s first attempt at e-commerce, which is a business model he called very difficult and very competitive to break into, but it has seen faster, more profitable traction than any of his previous projects. I asked him why he thought that was. Ready? Let’s do it.

02:37
think it’s been an accumulation of multiple of my skills. So I think I’ve been doing e-commerce for two and a half years. Before this, I’d sold thousands of products online through Amazon mainly, but also through Shopify. I studied architecture at university, which is heavily a design-based course, lots of Photoshop, lots of photo manipulation, learning about

03:05
the way to design things, also learning about the history of art. And then I also have done a lot of portrait art, like oil painting, pencil. So I think it was the combination of the three things made it that I was able to put a really good product out there, but also be able to sell that product and market the product properly. Was anybody else doing this or was this just something like, I know I’m going to put

03:33
picture of your dog on a classic painting and we’ll mash them together. Other people are doing them, but other people are doing them badly. So kind of the biggest competitor, they pretty much just cut out a dog’s head and put it on a old kind of Renaissance style portrait. What I’ve done is made sure that every piece looks like a piece of art. So every piece is

04:01
digitally painted, it’s merged with the costume so that it really looks like the dog could have been there and posed and someone painted it. Was there a lightning strike of inspiration to say, yes, this is going to be my next side hustle? we actually, on our podcast, we did an Etsy challenge where it was two weeks, who can make the most money on Etsy? And it was me versus the co-host Alex.

04:31
He has these customized bar ends for bikes, because he’s a product designer. And because my background was art, I thought I’ll start doing these things. So I started doing these things, stayed as my side hustle for a long time while I was working on my other things. And then I think when it started to hit maybe seven or $8,000 a month in sales, I thought, maybe I’m going to have to switch this over to my main thing now and start trying to scale, hire people, those kinds of things.

05:01
It started off very much as a little project side hustle, which then turned into very much a main hustle. I like this. You guys are throwing down the challenges to each other on air and say, okay, who could make the most money on Etsy? Let’s do it. And you say, okay, well, how can I combine these skills and areas of interest that I already have and create something that’s better than what’s already out there? And it sounds like you really had a home run with that when

05:29
you were first setting up your shop, do you recall those first orders or what do you think gained that initial traction? remember spending a lot of money on Etsy ads and it not being a particularly good return. So initially like turning off, like I was making a loss at the start on the ads and then I was getting a bit of organic sales through Etsy and that kind of dropped off. And then I think I’d switch the ads on again. I was like, you know what, I’ll invest a little bit in ads and then

05:58
think Etsy is quite rewarding in the way that if you spend money on ads, they will also help you out in terms of SEO and showing it to people. And no matter how much I scale ads, it seems to look like Etsy will give you equal back. So if you bring 5,000 people to the store, they’ll bring 5,000 people to the store. That’s the way that it’s worked with me. I don’t know if that is the hard rule of Etsy, but it seems like that.

06:27
I’ve heard it’s become very much pay to play. Like if you’re relying on Etsy organic discovery, organic search, you’re fighting an uphill battle. But if you can afford to run some trials with their in-house ad system, then it sounds like good things start to spin. Yeah. And their ad system is the best. It has no settings. You just type in how much you want to spend and that’s it.

06:50
That sounds like just such a leap of faith in ad dollars. It’s like, uh, okay. You mean I don’t get to target my people or my keywords or anything? Yeah, they pick it all for you. And for a lot of people, that’s great. And for a lot of people, that’s not great for me. That’s great. Especially because I’m getting such a high return on ad spend at the moment that it doesn’t bother me. And I quite like it. I’m not an ads expert. I’ve never really run a

07:17
wildly successful Facebook ad or Google ad in my life. So having Etsy ads where I just either up the ad spend or down the ad spend is amazing. For a custom product like this, did you have a sense of what to charge or how much the market would bear here? I looked around to see what other people were charging and I definitely wasn’t the cheapest. just, at that time, it felt like that was what was right for the amount of work.

07:47
that I was putting in. And it seems like the market thinks that’s the right price. And I’ve just not changed it since. I’m looking at the shop now. seems like the average rates, depending on the size and what you want done, it’s like 30 to $100 ish. Yeah. So I mean, the easiest way to break down the cost is it’s pretty much $30 for the piece of art, just as the digital. And then if you’re having it on an 8 by 10 canvas, the 8 by 10 canvas is $20.

08:17
If you’re having on 12 by 16, then it’s like $40. So it would be $70 for the 12 by 16. And it’s free shipping as well. So the shipping’s included in that prize. the beginning, you’re doing this art yourself. So someone would send you a picture of their dog. You had a handful of not blank, but like you said, Renaissance style paintings or other pieces of art where, okay, I could realistically Photoshop a dog’s head on here and make it look like it was painted into the original.

08:45
And you were doing that yourself at first using your Photoshop skills. Yeah. So I started off doing it myself. Now I have a team of two full-time artists and then 21 freelance artists that are working pretty much full-time at the moment. So they vary in how much they can produce each day, but most of them produce like five to seven pieces. And during that process, I mean, what my…

09:14
role is now at the company is making sure that all of these pieces of art are actually better than mine and that they all meet a certain standard. So I spend a lot of time creating basically like educational material for the artists so that they can always be improving their designs. I have made the best artists that I’ve hired who’s

09:40
one of my full-time artists, head of art, and he basically will go in with each of the artists and make sure that they’re doing their work up to standard and then also educate them, help them do it better. And we’re constantly like improving and making sure that it looks more and more like artwork because that’s essentially what I’m trying to create is like everyone who buys from us, it looks like they’re getting a van worth. It doesn’t matter which artist does it. They all look.

10:09
pretty much the same. Yeah, that’s interesting how it’s not completely automated, completely digitized, but there’s this element of manual labor that goes into creating these things such that they look super individualized and customized for each pet. really cool. Yeah, it’s kind of a strange business. I was saying this to someone the other day. Well, they said to me, it’s not actually a product-based business. It’s actually a service-based business because

10:37
Every time someone comes to me, although they’re getting a product in the post, they’re buying a service because we have to start from scratch every time to create this new piece. Although I can see yourself like, well, we had a, in my case, we had a Shih Tzu last week, you know, it’s got to be close enough. Like, no, no, no. We’ve got to use the actual picture that somebody submitted. Yeah, we basically have to do that. You see so many dogs that it’s so hard to even like remember what happened and what order number it would possibly be.

11:07
Yeah, they all blur together. This has got my gears spinning a little bit on what else this could be applied to because this is a really interesting one. If you have the skills or you can hire somebody with the skills to get this stuff done. Do you have a sense of what percentage of people go for just like the digital print or most people like, no, I want the physical canvas mailed to me? I would say probably about 20 to 30 percent pick the digital only and the rest want their canvases or posters.

11:34
think the reason is because actually the pricing is pretty reasonable for the canvases and the posters and they would struggle to get that themselves if they went out and tried to order one online. So I think just like keeping the price reasonable, obviously I make like a little bit of markup on it, but I don’t want to rip people off at the same time. And I prefer people getting a canvas or a poster that was from us. So then I know that they’ve got a decent print so that they take.

12:02
pictures and create user generated content and they’re definitely having it printed out and showing to other people because I think word of mouth has been a massive advertising platform for us. Yeah, I believe it. I imagine once those first few customers who found you either organically or through those Etsy ads, know, once they get their orders back, they say, this is incredible. This is fantastic. You so they’re sharing it.

12:29
on Instagram and everybody else can go and take a look at it and that leads to more sales or more exposure in that way. I was going to ask if you had all of that physical product infrastructure, if that’s a drop shipping setup, like how that shipping and fulfillment is happening for the canvas and poster prints. Yeah, so it’s basically a drop shipping model. So I’ve got a printing partner and they do all of it and send the tracking numbers to

12:57
Etsy or Shopify. And it just works better that way. The prices are so competitive. Like if I were to go and buy a printer and hire someone to make the canvases, wouldn’t even be able to get close to their prices. Yeah. Is that done through a Printful or a Printify or something like that? Guten. Oh, okay. Yeah. Their prices are a lot better for canvas and posters and

13:22
From other products that I’ve looked at, I also do these Christmas sweaters as well that is just like a dog head cut out in a Santa outfit. The prices were a couple dollars cheaper for those as well. So I think Guten is definitely up there as one of the cheaper ones to use. It’s not as sexy as Printful, but it’s definitely much more reasonably priced. Now that is an important piece of the puzzle here, like having somebody else.

13:47
with the backend to the physical product fulfillment and the global distribution. hey, you’re saying free shipping, global shipping, that’s a lot to try and manage, especially at the volume that you find yourself doing all of a sudden if you were running this out of a spare bedroom. It’s difficult enough having to scale up artists every time that I’m scaling up sales. Having to scale up production as well would be

14:15
nightmare and there would definitely be things that get lost. I think if you’re in a position where you have this kind of business or any kind of product business, get rid of the logistics as quickly as possible. It’s horrible. It eats up so much time. you run into any production issues or fulfillment logistics issues? I imagine with the volume that you’re doing, somebody’s bound to get the wrong dog or something. Yeah, there’s been wrong dogs.

14:43
Not loads, maybe like three or four over the time. It was actually when we were getting much lower orders and it was just teething problems of starting. Now the system set up so much better. Like I pretty much had to build a software out of lots of different softwares to manage the ordering system. Because when you’re getting this many orders, there’s not really a piece of software out there that allows you to manage, you know, like a group of artists and then assigning them all.

15:13
a mini project to do and then having it going through if the customer wants iterations to it, if it’s ready for me to check, all these kinds of things. It was originally on a Google Sheet and now using the software called ClickUp, but it’s got a huge automation element to it where there’s Dropbox folders being created automatically and things getting sent off to Google Sheets and things coming in from Etsy and…

15:40
Shopify into the Google Sheet and then being added to ClickUp as tasks. So I basically had to make this weird software out of these three softwares because there wasn’t something out there that actually fulfilled my needs. there you go. There’s the next side hustle. Everybody migrates to software eventually, right? Okay, so let’s talk about that workflow for a minute. So somebody discovers the storefront. They say, yes, I would like this. I was looking at the Yoda one.

16:08
It’s like, OK, I would love to have my dogs head on this Yoda costume. And so they place the order. And then what happens after that? tell me about that workflow. You place an order on, Shopify or Etsy. It doesn’t really matter. That automatically gets added to the database. It then gets added to ClickUp as a task.

16:31
If it’s Shopify, then it automatically adds the customer reference photos and all the information about it. So the costume that they want and the size. If it’s Etsy, it doesn’t do that. one of the virtual assistants has to go in, find that information, upload it to the Dropbox that is automatically created. It’s then assigned to an artist. They do the piece of artwork.

17:00
they mark it off that they’ve done it, I then go in and check it. If I think it’s good enough, get sent off to the customer by one of the VAs. The customer has 48 hours to check it and say if they want any changes or if they approve it. And then if they want changes, changes are made, if they approve it, then it gets sent off. Well, one of the other VAs.

17:23
goes into Guten, orders it, gets shipped off to the customer and arrives at their house. So there’s a lot of moving parts and there’s a lot of parts where it has kind of broken in the past. And the operational side of the business has definitely been the biggest headache for me and the hardest thing to scale. And I think the place where I’ve learned the most, again, it’s one of those unsexy things that

17:50
No one’s talking about on podcasts or in books very often. It’s something that when you get to this point that you realize you have to learn bits of project management and operational management and all those kinds of things. All of the behind the scenes stuff that really make it tick. And this is a really important differentiation here between just a straight up print on demand service like, I’m selling t-shirts with some clever slogan on it. Those orders get automatically sent to Guten or Printful or whoever you’re using for fulfillment.

18:19
It’s like this element of customization is what is causing all this back and forth. But it’s also what differentiates you from everybody else that’s out there. It’s like, this is what makes it worth 30, 40, $50 to order. And it’s really kind of a cool thing that you have built there. When you’re going out and trying to find a software and it doesn’t exist is the strangest experience because you’re Googling all these things, but you don’t really know what you’re Googling. I’m Googling like artist management.

18:49
software, like designer management, small scale operation management software. And it all it would throw me back with was like monday.com or Asana. did you look at Jar at all the guys that design pickle built Jar to handle their design flow? I didn’t see that. No. It might be worth a look. I don’t know. It seems like they’re probably getting in more reps. Okay, so each customer is getting a digital proof of their portrait before the order is complete. So I imagine that gives you a chance to make any

19:19
corrections that almost guarantees that you’re getting a five-star review because they said, yes, this is what I want. Anything else on that customer approval process? You said they had just a 48-hour turnaround to say, yay or nay. The customer approval process is very important because customer experience is the most important thing, I think, even before product, maybe. Because everyone

19:45
cares about reviews now, it’s really any kind of online purchase is about the reviews because the social proof, people just looking at it, I don’t know how many more times likely to buy, but I’m sure it’s a lot. So giving the customer the opportunity to check and say if they want changes and then doing the changes regardless of if I think the changes are good is really, really important. And the reason

20:15
is because I want the customers to go out and tell people it was so easy to communicate with the seller. They asked me if I wanted changes. They made the changes and the final product I got was great. And generally that’s what the reviews say from people. The reason that I introduced this 48 hour timer was because sometimes like they just don’t read their emails. They don’t read their Etsy messages. There has to be a point where I say, sorry,

20:44
This is the cutoff. I do make it very clear. If you don’t respond within 48 hours before they buy it says it as they send the photos, it says it. And then as I send them the mockup, it says it. actually changed the wording and it used to say unlimited changes. And people really did take that quite literally. So I changed the wording to, we will send it to you for approval.

21:14
so that then people generally just approve it. Because my other thought was, we’re an art company. And if someone produces a piece of art for you, you don’t ask for changes. That’s not what artists do. They produce a piece of art, you receive it. It might not be exactly what you wanted, but that’s what art is. And I’m trying to turn it as much into an art company as possible. And if you get a Van Werf,

21:43
then you get a van worth. Obviously, still want, especially with Etsy, I still want the customers to be able to ask for the changes. Etsy is a very personal platform between the buyer and seller, especially when you’re in the custom space. And I want to make sure that the relationships there are, that they stay in good standing. I like that. That’s a very subtle shift from unlimited modifications or unlimited requests to, know,

22:12
we’ll send it your way for approval. I think that’s genius actually, because it’s like, hey, this is what our artists came up with. And if something major needs to be fixed, yeah, we’ll fix it. But here it is. That’s pretty much it. It’s the major fixes. You got the wrong body. You got the wrong dog head on the wrong side, because sometimes it might have two dogs in it. It’s stuff like that. Was there anything that you did to optimize your Etsy store for either conversions or discoverability? Yeah, I’ve done lots of

22:42
conversion optimization, I added video at some point. So I got some professional videos shot by a videographer. I added those to some of the listings. I changed a lot of the wording round. I swapped some images round to see if that did anything. And all these things have made like slight improvements. I’m not going to do anything at the moment because conversion rates are a bit warped because of the Christmas.

23:05
period. So it wouldn’t be obvious what has happened. also we’re just so busy now. I don’t really need to focus on anything apart from making sure the artwork is good and that everything is working smoothly. So I have done some conversion rate optimization. It did work a little bit. I’m doing a lot of it on the store at the moment. You know, want to kind of double, triple the conversion rates. Had a UX audit recently and they came back with

23:35
A lot of things that need changing. And I think to anyone there who’s got an online store, got an Etsy store, subtle changes can make huge differences. And especially with like an online store where you’ve got absolutely free run of how it’s set up. It could be the, these minor things that you didn’t even realize that you had wrong, like the buy button being the wrong color or slightly in the wrong place or buyers don’t really know where it’s shipping from.

24:05
Like someone messaged me the other day and said, could you sell me a digital version because I’m in the U S so this customer had no idea that I don’t ship from the U S and it’s just things like that where it could knock the conversion rate down 0.5%. But what that actually is, is like, is a 50 % reduction in conversion rate when you’re looking at something like Shopify. Sure. Sure. Yeah. They’re like, no, no, no, we can ship it to you. It’s no problem.

24:34
Well, tell me about that building out of your own Shopify store versus relying solely on the Etsy platform. What’s the reasoning there and what’s going on at VanWoof.com? My first kind of flurry in e-commerce was I had an Amazon FBA business selling hemp oil on Amazon and it was going really well. I mean, at the time I had quit my job in the February and by November I was making, you know, about

25:04
$10,000 profit per month. I was living in Vietnam and like just completely living the high life. was like, oh my God, this is amazing. This is pretty much running on autopilot. It got cut off from me overnight and just Amazon banned my product. All my funds got cut off. Your product specifically, or like this category of product? The products were always getting banned.

25:28
They now are, you’re allowed to sell CBD oil on Amazon at the time. You weren’t really, so people were selling it as hemp oil. It got re-initiated again and then it got taken away from me again. So I twice had a platform cut me off. And I think you’ve had a similar Google slap at some point. Yeah. Everybody has their Google slap stories. Yeah. So I’m well aware of when you don’t control the customers, what can happen.

25:56
So one of my initial plans was always, okay, get this onto a store, grow the store as quickly as possible. I’ve got two marketing agencies. One are Facebook ads experts. The others are Google ads experts to really try and grow the store as much as possible because I don’t like being reliant on a platform. I mean, you’re still reliant on like Facebook ads, Google ads, all these things, but having actual

26:24
control over everything that happens is very important for the longevity of a business. Yeah. Is there a dramatic difference in the fees with Shopify versus an order process through Etsy? Etsy fees are pretty good. think that they work out at about, I think, 10 to 11 % total. Shopify, it’s only kind of 2.3 or 2.4 % or something. So there’s a big difference.

26:50
In terms of conversion rates, the conversion rates on Etsy are so much better because the thing with these big platforms is everyone trusts Etsy, Amazon, eBay. When they go onto a new store, there’s all these, you know, they don’t know anything about it if they’ve not been told about it before. And it’s a whole new experience for them. They don’t know the buying process. They’ve got to type in their credit card details again. All these things that customers are wary of. What I’ve never done before with

27:18
Facebook is the remarketing campaigns that like they’re the most important, you know of the campaigns getting people educated about the store getting people back to the store So they are almost thinking. Oh, yeah, know this or I’ve seen it everywhere Right what you can’t do based on people who visit your Etsy store, but you can if they come to Van Wolf comm yeah, exactly Yeah, yeah, there’s no I mean, there’s no way of like retargeting people that going on your Etsy store But it’s so important to try and build

27:46
off of a platform and just not be reliant on one platform. But Etsy is great. I’ve pretty much been on, I mean, I’ve used Amazon, I’ve done a lot of selling on eBay. Etsy is the best by a long way. I really, really like Etsy. Is there something on Amazon that would allow you to do custom portraits like this? Is there anything in their arsenal? Yeah, there is. Yeah. So I am a registered

28:14
custom product Amazon sell it in the US. They just don’t have the customer base for it and they don’t have a good setup for it. So I wouldn’t even bother creating the product on there because Amazon is so strict with things like shipping on time and all these things that when you’ve got custom products, it’s very hard to do. It’s interesting. So they do have it, but that’s just not the brand perception. People say if I want something custom, I know where to go and that’s Etsy. Yeah, exactly. Is there a target?

28:42
profit margin you’re shooting for on any one of these. I know you’ve got a huge team in place to deliver these orders now. Yeah. So, I mean, like the gross profit on each product is roughly 50%, but I mean, the operational costs are high. So that does get eaten into, but I’m interested to see what my profits will be at the end of November. I only do my accounting at the end of the month. So I don’t know what it’s going to be like for November, but it’s going to be a lot healthier than it’s ever been. Definitely.

29:12
Sure, it’s very much once you have team members in place, volume cures a lot of ills because you’re paying them whether or not they’re doing work. Or actually, I should rephrase that, like, are some of the folks paid on a per job basis? Yeah, so the freelancers are paid per job, but then I have some full time staff as well that are just paid by the hour, by the day. There are some costs. And then obviously there’s the marketing agencies that…

29:40
All these people need paying. I have so many Shopify apps that need paying for as well. They’re all the softwares. They cost money. I’ve got an automation software that costs about a hundred dollars a month. So all the things very quickly add up as you scale. But there’s no other way. There’s literally no other way. And I think it is important to know when you should spend money and you know, initial spending money on

30:08
marketing agency like the first month, it might not pay dividends because there’s a lot of testing and things like that, but three, four months down the line, then it will start paying off. The same with the automation software. If you’re bootstrapping a business and you’ve got $100 automation software, then I wouldn’t have wanted to pay something like that. But now it’s actually saving me hundreds of dollars each month in labor.

30:38
Yeah, I could do all these, you know, Zapier tasks myself, or I could just pay this fee. Okay. Is this something that people are actively searching for? Like, would it be a dream of yours to rank number one in Google for custom dog portraits? Is that a search term that is getting used? It doesn’t get a huge amount of traffic. I think I would like to rank top for something like dog portrait. And I don’t know, maybe three months ago, I reached out to the local newspaper where I grew up.

31:04
and was like, oh, I just started this business. It might be quite interesting for you guys to write about. So they wrote about it and I was like, I’ll get a backlink from this. I then wrote to the next biggest newspaper from the area where I grew up. And this is not a big area. It’s a place called Devon in the UK and the town might have had 30,000 people and then the city next to it might have had 250,000 people. like tiny places. So then

31:34
After this, small newspaper, I write to the bigger newspaper in the city and say, Oh, this newspaper wrote about it and quite an interesting story. I’m a local guy and I made this business. It’s doing okay. Then like a month later, this producer from a nationwide BBC TV show has read this article and gets in contact and it’s like, Hey, we want to do, you know, like this feature about.

32:01
people and their pets and these dog portraits that really cool. It’d be amazing if we can make a section for the one show. So this all happened because I tried to get a couple of backlinks and what I ended up getting was just this amazing piece of media attention because being on the BBC is also gives you the step up to be on other things. And it’s not aired yet. It is in probably

32:30
early December, I have no idea what something like that does. But it’s just like adding to the kind of storm of backlinks and people talking about your business and all those things that make, you know, get you up the rankings, get the free kind of organic traffic, get the media attention that gets you more media attention because it all kind of feeds into itself.

32:57
If you go out there and just focus on, know, I want to just do SEO and just try and get backlinks. It doesn’t really work. You kind of have to do it all at the same time and it all just feeds back into itself. And again, it’s just one of those things that just got really lucky where I’d reached out to like a couple of papers. They’d both written something and then I get reached out to by like one of the biggest media organizations in the world.

33:22
Yeah, that’s leveling up these small press wins into some major earned media. And it’s better than spending money on ads because it’s like an implicit endorsement there. And on top of that, to improve the conversion rate on the standalone Shopify store as seen on BBC, you know, so now all of a sudden it’s like this huge measure of social proof. had one other question I wanted to ask you about, which was sourcing the background art or sourcing kind of the foundational prints. Like, is that all just public domain art?

33:52
Yeah. So any, basically any artwork that was created before somewhere like 1920 is public domain. So it’s just a case of going out there and getting it. I’ve started doing newer stuff. Like you’ve seen the Jedi do some game of Thrones stuff. That’s all created by the artists. So I kind of get some reference pictures, mock it up. Then it’s all painted. We’ve got a load of Marvel ones coming out as well. So the more modern ones.

34:21
What I do is I get reference pictures. kind of almost create a collage of like a background and maybe the costume and maybe some other props and things. And then they’ll get digitally painted over to create it. So it’s like an individual piece that you won’t see anywhere else. Okay. And it’s considered fair use because you’ve adapted it. You’ve made your own interpretation of it. Yeah, exactly.

34:43
Luke, what’s next for you? You’ve got the Lockdown Livelihood podcast. You’ve got a busy e-commerce season going on. I appreciate you taking the time today to share with Side S Nation what’s going on in Van Wolf world. What’s next for you? Where do you want to take this in 2021? It’s going to be a big media push, think. So, like really focusing on getting the brand out there as much as possible and trying to turn it into as much of a household brand.

35:07
As I can, improving the operational side is always important, but I think I’m going to try and take a step back from that as much as possible. Currently hiring, I think they call them a fractional COO, which is somebody who comes in and just kind of acts as the operations officer just to make sure everything’s running smoothly. And I will try and focus as much as possible on media appearances and just getting VanWoof out there as much as possible.

35:36
over the spring, over the summer, when this thing was in its very early stages, or when you and Alex are laying out the ground rules for this challenge. Did you have any idea this is what it would look like six months from now? No, I think you always have visions. I remember actually very distinctly saying to my girlfriend at some point, oh, if I start getting 10 orders a day, maybe you can start printing them off and sending them to people.

36:02
she lives in America thinking at the time, no, that’s ridiculous. That’s never going to happen. So you always have kind of ambitions in your head about the brands you create and things, but at the same time, you’re also kind of realistic. Like I’ve had so many failed business ideas in the last two and a half years, and I’m very realistic about things. I’m very grateful with where things are now and just like having a steady income when you are a full-time entrepreneur is

36:31
It’s just the nicest feeling ever. I always think that being an entrepreneur is very similar to being an artist where you’re basically not making any money most of the time. When you’re starting off as an artist, when you’re starting off as an entrepreneur, I quit my job to do it. And you have to kind of live a lower quality of life to how like all your friends are kind of.

36:57
They’re getting promoted in their jobs, especially when they’re getting to 30 and they’re starting to get senior positions and getting paid good wages. And then you have to cut everything down and not live in as a nicer place and not be able to go out for the meals. then, so when stuff starts to pay off, it feels really good. And I’m just trying to appreciate the situation and be grateful every day for the amount of orders that I’m getting and the money that’s coming in.

37:24
Yeah, it’s really exciting to see what you build. I’ve been smiling through this whole conversation just because I think it’s such a creative business and the way that it’s set up essentially for non-demand drop shipping. think it’s a really cool operation. VanWoof.com. You check them out over there. Order yourself a custom pet portrait. And of course, check out the Lockdown Livelihood podcast on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Luke, let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.

37:52
Take action on your ideas. think it works a lot better than going out there and doing courses and reading books. You learn as you are taking the action. And I think something that I’ve got really good at, and this was a two week challenge, right? So the idea of that is go out there, take action as quickly as possible. You’ve got two weeks to do it, see what you can do, because you don’t know where the things are going to take you. You know exactly what’s going to happen at the end of reading a book. You’re going to know a couple more things.

38:21
but actually like going out there and doing something, you learn so much along the way. And then as things happen, you realize that the next thing that you need to learn and then you go out and learn it. So I think action is the most important thing. is a very strong educator. I like the idea of giving yourself a deadline to, hey, here’s a two week challenge. I’m gonna test something out. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, okay, back to the drawing board for the next two weeks. Anyways, Luke, very much appreciate you joining me, taking some time out of this busy season.

38:51
and we’ll catch up with you soon. Thanks, Nick.

38:57
So I push the button to stop the recording on this call and Luke goes, hey man, eight new orders came in while we were talking. So it just goes to show you if you can hit the product in the marketplace right, things can really escalate quickly. Now, unfortunately, we are past the cutoff for a Christmas delivery from VanWoof this year, but still encourage you to check out the kind of art they’re cranking out over there. Hopefully you enjoyed this chat and it gets your creative juices flowing. Once again, you’ll find the full text summary of this episode.

39:26
with links to all the resources mentioned at sidehustlenation.com slash Luke. Hey, one last thing. Can I send you some free stuff? If you head on over to sidehustlenation.com slash join, I’ll send you my free report, the five fastest ways to make more money, plus my weekly newsletter packed with money making ideas. On top of that, you’ll also get access to hundreds of members only goodies and bonus files, including tons of tactical tips from top podcast guests.

39:53
plus an invite to the world’s largest, most active, and most supportive Side Hustle community. That’s all free for you at sidehustlenation.com slash join, or text the code HUSTLEON to 33444. Big thanks to Luke for sharing his story, and big thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this episode. Your seven-day trial awaits at ahrefs.com.

40:16
That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in until next time. Let’s go out there and make something happen and I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on. So I hope you enjoyed that episode. And once again, that interview was for my buddy Nick Loper over at side hustle nation dot com. His podcast is called The Side Hustle Show. And I encourage you to go check it out over at side hustle nation dot com. In the meantime, if you were interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife quarter job dot com and sign up for my free six day mini course.

40:46
Just put your email in there and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.