Pick the launch date. Build the demand before your collection goes live.
The six weeks in between are where the selling quietly happens, with the people who already buy from you. By launch morning they are not discovering your collection, they are waiting for the link.
- £12,000
- from a single email, over one launch weekend
- 157
- copies sold of the digital version of that same collection, at £2.50, and you should price yours higher than I did
Both numbers came off one Christmas collection. Same making, same table, two different ways of selling it.
There's a particular kind of quiet that comes after you list a new collection. You've made the thing, you've put it up, and now you're refreshing the page, hoping today's the day people find it.
What if the day was already decided, and your people were already waiting for it?
That's the whole idea behind a launch. Instead of dropping a collection into the Etsy search and hoping it surfaces, you pick a date, you warm up the people who already love your work, and by the time it goes live they're turning up for it on purpose.
I did this with a Christmas collection once. I spent the weeks beforehand quietly building the anticipation, even slipping little fabric samples into orders so people were excited before I'd sold a thing. That weekend did £12,000 from a single email.
I did that one the expensive way. I was racing to get the fabric out of China before my competitors got theirs, I had ordered a quantity nobody could have told me would shift, and the delivery date the whole thing hung on was not mine to control. The weekend itself was calm. Getting to it was me working out what to do next while it was already happening, with the money long gone. You don't need the fabric run or the nerve for any of that. You need the order the six weeks happen in, and that is the part I can hand straight over.
Then there's the second quiet win, the one most makers walk straight past. Alongside your collection you set up a digital version of it, once, in an afternoon. It sits next to your made pieces and earns from the people who were never going to buy the physical thing anyway. The same collection, earning twice, with no extra hours at the table. I priced my first one far too low, at £2.50, and still sold 157 of them. Price yours properly and the maths gets a good deal more interesting.
The Handmade Launch System walks you through both, gently, in the order you actually need them. You come out the other side with a real collection, a real date, and a launch your customers show up for, instead of another listing you put up and hope for.
What changes when the date comes first
At the moment the collection goes up when it is finished, and finished is whenever it happens. So if there is a plan at all it tends to be a number. A hundred listings by Christmas. Twenty new designs. More of them, and better ones, and then a wait to see whether this turns out to be a good month.
You can do all of that and still not be able to say why one month sold and the next one didn't. The sales arrive when they feel like it.
The odd part is that nothing about the shop has to change for that to be different. Ask a maker what she is doing about Christmas and she will tell you how many listings she is adding. Ask the same maker about a launch and she will name a product and a date, in the same breath, without being prompted. The shop is identical. The question was different.
A date is a thing you can work backwards from, and a number is not. The making has to be finished by then. The photographs before that. The people who already buy from you have to have heard it is coming before that, which is what turns the weeks while you are still at the table from dead time into the launch itself.
That is the whole method, and it is why phase three is the one the other five hang off.
Jess makes embroidery hoops. Before her first proper launch she had 340 people on her email list, and in that first week she made just over £1,400. Her best week on Etsy before that was £210.
She built the 340 with cards in her orders and business cards handed out at craft fairs. No ads, no big following, a card at a time for three months.
The plan itself
Six phases, run in order, with everything working backwards from the date you set in phase three.
Phase 01
Shape your collection
Get the collection right before you touch anything else and the rest of the plan has something worth building excitement around. We start with the feeling, not the product list.
Phase 02
Add the digital layer
Every physical product already has a second version sitting inside it: the pattern, the template, the design file. You create it once alongside your making, and it sells over and over with no packing and no postage.
Phase 03
Set your launch date
Set the date before you are ready, and let the deadline do the work of making you ready. Everything in this plan works backwards from this one decision.
Phase 04
Price everything
Three things to price: physical, digital, and bundles. A launch does not need a discount; the scarcity and the anticipation do the selling. Price it like you mean it.
Phase 05
Build the anticipation
This is the bit where the sell-out is actually made. By the time you go live, your warmest customers should already have decided to buy; launch day just hands them the link.
Phase 06
Emails and launch week
Six pre-written emails, timed to your date, plus a week-by-week checklist. You load them once into systeme.io, send yourself a test, and launch day stays calm because there is almost nothing left to do.
What you actually get
- The nine launch emails, written out
- The Launch Email Swipe Kit comes with this, so the words are already done. One a week from six weeks out, then three in launch week itself, plus one more that only comes with this: the email for the digital version you make in phase two. Each has a note saying when it goes and why it works. You change the bits in brackets to your own and read them aloud until they sound like you rather than like a template.
- A week-by-week checklist
- Each week has its own few small jobs, done in their own week, so that none of it piles onto launch day.
- Somewhere to write yours down as you go
- You answer at the end of every phase, so what you come out holding is your collection, your date and your prices, and not a set of notes about mine.
One payment, and it stays on your shelf for the collection after this one
What you need before this works
This is launch planning, and a launch needs somebody to launch to. If you have people you can email when the collection goes live, even a small handful of them, you have everything this needs.
If you haven't got a list yet, that is not a reason to go somewhere else first. Building one is what phase five is for, and the six weeks of anticipation are what fill it. You will not be launching to an empty room.
Where I would say wait is if nobody is finding your shop at all. Getting seen is a different job to launching, and Inkspace List is where I would send you for it. Come back to this after.
What you get, and what the six weeks do
You get: the six phases in the order they run, nine launch emails written out and ready to paste, and the week-by-week checklist that goes with them. It stays on your shelf, so the collection after this one runs on the same thing.
What the six weeks do is make sure that when your date comes round, the people who already buy from you knew it was coming and had made their minds up before the link went live. That is the part a launch actually controls, and it is the part that decides most of them. I won't put a number on your collection, because your list and your prices are yours and I have never seen them.
If you open it and that is not what is in there, email me and I will refund you on the spot, no explaining.
Why now, and it is not a countdown
There is no price rise on Friday, and there is no countdown on this page.
The only thing pushing is your own date. The plan runs backwards from it and the runway is six weeks, so whatever you are launching next, those six weeks have to sit in front of it rather than after it.
Christmas is the easiest one to count. Say you want the collection live by the end of November, so there is time to make everything and get it posted. Count back six weeks and the anticipation starts in the middle of October, which puts choosing the collection and picking the date in September, while most of the makers you are up against are still thinking about it. Do the same sum with whatever your next date is, a spring range, a wedding season, whatever yours turns out to be.
Leave it later than that and the early weeks have to happen late, which is the one part of this that does not work compressed. The anticipation is the bit that needs the time. And if your nearest date is already inside its six weeks, the date you are planning is the one after it, which you would far rather know now than find out in launch week.
£97, yours to keep
You buy it once and it stays on your shelf, so you can run it again on every collection you launch from here on.
If you would rather not run the six weeks on your own, the Handmade Launch Sprint is the same thing with me in it, and this workbook comes with it