What do you actually type back when somebody asks “do you do custom orders?”
12 lines, in the order they go in a conversation, with a note on each one saying when to send it and why it works.
10 of 10 left at this price.
Open it, and if there aren’t 12 lines in there you can use tonight, I’ll refund you on the spot.
Somebody messaged you on Tuesday asking if you do custom orders, and it’s Thursday now and you still haven’t answered.
I know exactly what that looks like, because I’ve done it. You’ve read it about four times. You know roughly what you’d make them and roughly what it would cost, and every version you draft in your head starts with the price and a link, and you can hear how that lands before you’ve even typed it.
So you leave it a bit longer. And then you either send the price and the link anyway and they never reply, or you send nothing at all and tell yourself they were probably only having a look.
That message was honestly the warmest thing that happened to you all week.
Nobody who types that is browsing. She opened your page, looked properly at your work, decided it was worth saying something out loud to a stranger, and then came and stood in front of you.
And the bit that does my head in, genuinely, is that this is the one part of selling where all the hard work is already done. You don’t have to find her. You don’t have to get seen. She has found you, and the whole thing now rests on what you type into a little grey box.
You’re already good at the hard parts, by the way. Somebody just never showed you this one, and it’s the smallest of the lot.
Three things you’re probably thinking
“I’d only sound false”
Oh, you wouldn’t. And I don’t think that’s really the worry anyway.
The worry underneath is that you’d end up sounding like the people who slide into your messages about growing your account. Nobody wants to be that, and I’d hate it too.
But have a think about what actually makes those messages so horrible. Every one of them tells you what they’ve got and what it costs before they’ve asked you a single thing about yourself, so the whole pitch turns up before there’s anything to pitch at.
That’s an order problem, and an order problem is quite a nice thing to have, because you can fix one of those without turning into somebody else.
“I don’t get enough messages for it to matter”
This is the one I’d have said myself, and it’s wrong in a way that’s really hard to see when you’re stood inside it.
A handful of enquiries a week isn’t a small number. It’s a small number of extremely warm people, and those two things are nothing like each other. Think about the strangers scrolling past your posts, where you’d be thrilled with 1 in 1,000 stopping. The woman in your inbox has already stopped, already looked, and already typed.
So every one you leave on read on a Thursday is a sale you were closer to than any amount of posting was ever going to get you. Which stings a bit, I know. It stung me.
“I don’t want to be pushy”
Neither do I, and honestly this is the objection I take most seriously of the lot, because the instinct behind it is a good one and it nearly always belongs to somebody who makes really lovely things and is far too quiet about it.
So let’s count them. Of the 12 lines, only 3 ask for anything at all. The other 9 are questions, or they’re you repeating back what she just said, or they’re you telling somebody honestly that you’re not the right maker for what she wants. One of them is how to back off properly when the answer is not right now, which is a thing I wish somebody had written down for me.
That’s just the shape a conversation comes out in when you build one. It isn’t something I worked out afterwards to get round the feeling.
The order is the whole thing
There’s an order to a conversation that ends with somebody buying, and most of us run it backwards, because nobody has ever sat a maker down and told her there was an order at all.
Backwards feels like good manners, which is exactly why it survives, and it’s why I did it for years without once thinking to question it. She asks what it costs, so you answer the question she asked, because not answering would be rude. And the number lands on a woman who hasn’t yet said a word about what it’s for, or who it’s for, or when she needs it.
From that second on, the number is the only thing in the room. There’s nothing else for her to weigh it against, so she weighs it against nothing, and £85 sounds like an awful lot when it’s sat there on its own.
You weren’t being pushy. You were being fast.
And I’m not going to pretend any of that is obvious, because I ran my own shop for 7 years and got it wrong the whole way through, and I was the one doing the selling.
The bit nobody warns you about
Under-asking loses you more orders than being pushy ever will, and I don’t think anybody says that out loud to makers.
It’s the message that ends “anyway, just shout if you ever fancy one!” It feels polite, doesn’t it, and I sent it for years. But it hands the whole decision back to a woman who was nearly there and now has nothing to hold on to and no idea what happens next. She wanted you to tell her what happens next. That was the whole reason she messaged.
There’s one line in here for exactly that, and it’s 8 words long, and it’s the one I’d want if I were the one buying this.
What it actually looks like inside
Two real bits of it, so you’re not buying a description.
Pitching too early
1 of 6Hi! Yes I do customs, they start at £140, here's my order form!
I do, yes. Who's it for?
What changed: the price waits for a reason.
The worked conversation
5 of 14The price hasn’t come up yet, and that is the whole point. The other 9 messages, including the one where she says that’s more than I thought, are inside.
What’s in it
- 12 lines
In the order they go
Each one with when to send it and why it earns its place.
- 6 patterns
The ones that read as salesy
Sat beside the human version of the same message, so you can see exactly what changed.
- 5 replies
What she means when she says it
I'll have a think, have you got anything cheaper, how long does it take. Three different messages, and only one of them is a no.
- 14 messages
A whole conversation, written out
From do you take custom orders to the payment link, including the bit where she says that's more than I thought.
- 5 fixes
For when it isn't working
They reply once and vanish, everybody says that's a lot, or you have lovely long chats that never turn into anything.
Straight away, no account needed first.
Why I think this works
One of my first launches, I priced the whole collection about 10% under everybody else and told myself the stock just needed to shift.
That wasn’t caution, whatever I called it at the time. It was doubt with a number on it. I wasn’t confident enough to price the thing for what it was worth, so I let the number do my apologising for me, and it sold out in an hour and I didn’t feel proud of it for a single second.
Then I spent the rest of that week fielding messages. People asking when it was coming back, people wanting more, me answering every last one of them in a little grey box at eleven at night.
All the money in that business moved through conversations like that, and nobody ever taught me how to have one.
I learned to photograph. I learned to list. I learned what Etsy wanted from a title. Not one thing I ever bought taught me what to type back to a woman who had already decided she liked my work.
Who I am
7 years on Etsy across 3 different shops. Bags and purses, then hairbows, then craft supplies, which means I rebuilt the whole thing twice and it does my head in slightly to think about.
£2.41 an hour making glitter hairbows to £180,000 a year, own site and Etsy together.
I’m not an Etsy coach who never had a shop.
What I promise, and what I won’t
Open it, and if there aren’t 12 lines in there you can use tonight, email me and I’ll refund you on the spot, no explaining and no hard feelings.
What I can promise is that you’ll know what to type. What happens after that is between you and her, and I’d be making it up if I told you otherwise, because I don’t know what you make or who’s in your inbox.
Every line has [brackets] in it on purpose. I give you the order and the shapes. The sweet peas are yours, and they’re the bit that actually sells it.
Why now
£7 is for the first 10 people, and then it goes up. That’s not me inventing a deadline, it’s me telling you what I’m doing. I genuinely don’t know yet whether this sells, so the first 10 are cheap on purpose, and the minute I know it works the price changes.
10 of 10 left at £7
What’s actually pushing, though, is the message already sat in your inbox. A DM goes cold in a way a listing never does. Nobody has ever opened Etsy, seen a bag from 2023 and thought well that’s a bit old now. But a reply on day 4 to a message from day 1 is a different conversation to the one you’d have had on the Tuesday, and you can feel it going a bit stiff while you’re typing it.
You’re going to get another one of those messages this week either way.
£7
10 of 10 left at £7
Pay once and it’s yours, for this message and every one after it. No subscription, and nothing else to buy.
No account needed first. Pay here and I'll email you a link that opens it and signs you in.
This is for you if people already message you, even if it’s only a few a week, and you want to stop guessing what to send back. It doesn’t matter what you make or how long you’ve been at it. If somebody is typing to you, this works.
Wait a bit if nobody’s finding you yet, because there’s nobody to try it on. Start with the Handmade Launch Planner, which is free, and come back to me when there are people in your inbox to answer.
And nothing to lose either way. Open it, and if there aren’t 12 lines in there you can use tonight, email me and I’ll refund you on the spot, no explaining and no hard feelings.
That message from Tuesday is still sat there.