The Launch Sprint · Two of five · 3 min read
What do you do when it goes quiet?
Most of us list something new.
It is the one lever the shop actually gives you, so you photograph the thing, you write the title, you move the keyword to the front because you read somewhere that is what you are meant to do, and then you check the stats a few more times than you would happily admit to.
I did exactly that when I opened my first shop. Terrible photos, listed on a hope, refreshing to see whether anything had moved.
Somebody who has been selling handmade for 17 years told me recently what she does in a quiet spell. She lists more items, because new listings get a bit of a push.
And then, in the same message, without pausing, she told me that her repeat customers are the ones who actually carry her through the quiet times.
Both halves of the answer, sat in the same message, and she has never once put them together.
The people getting her through are the people she never contacts on purpose. When it goes quiet she goes looking for strangers, and the ones who already love her work are sat there in her order history, hearing nothing.
None of this is because your work is not good enough
I want to say that early, because it is the thing most makers privately think, and it is almost never the problem. The work is usually lovely. What is broken sits somewhere else entirely.
Every sale starts from cold.
Somebody has to find you, from nothing, having never heard of you, on a platform showing them 40 other people making something similar. Then you do it again for the next sale, and the one after that, forever, and none of it accumulates.
You cannot tell where the sales came from.
A maker told me she got an order after six months of nothing, and when I asked how the buyer had found her, she said she wished she knew. A sale you cannot explain is a lottery win rather than a business, because you cannot do it again on purpose.
The only lever you are given is more listings.
So when it goes quiet you list something, because new listings get a push, and the treadmill speeds up while the shop looks busier and earns the same.
The people who already bought from you disappear.
They chose you out of everybody, paid you real money, and were pleased enough with what arrived that they would probably do it again. And you have no way of telling them anything, ever.
Everything is capped at the speed of your hands.
A good month is a knackering month, by definition, and there is no version of this where that changes on its own.
And there is the thing you keep meaning to sort out.
Somebody said to me recently that she had no marketing or selling plan at all, and that at some point she would address that. Not lazy, not disorganised. Making is the part that feels like progress, so it wins every evening.
Read that back and notice that not one line of it is about the quality of what you make.
Which raises a fairly obvious question about all the advice.
Part 3 of 5. And why all of it points in the same direction.