Surpassing $1 Million on Etsy | My Life Story

About this video

Dylan Jahraus tells her life story as the background to her Etsy success. She says she grew up in Minnesota on a 160-acre horse farm with entrepreneur parents — her mother a dentist with her own practice and her father owner of a fencing construction business — and an older sister with a chromosomal micro deletion, a heart valve transplant at six weeks old, scoliosis and a cleft palate. She says at age 11 she found her mother’s journal and first saw the words ‘crack cocaine’ about her father’s hidden addiction, and at 13 her sister suffered cardiac arrest in gym class, was not given CPR, and emerged from a coma with a permanent anoxic brain injury. She describes being waitlisted at Stanford, attending the College of William and Mary on an academic scholarship, studying marketing and international business, studying buying and product development in London, blogging, interning at Marie Claire, and working as a buyer for Zappos and then Zulily. After meeting her Navy officer husband and moving to San Diego without a job, she says she dog-walked via Rover making $1,000 a month and sold Alibaba jewelry on eBay, then listed a floral letter made for her wedding on Etsy. She claims yearly Etsy sales of $134,000 in the first year, $142,000 in 2018, $244,000 the next year, $360,000 in 2020 and $320,000 in 2021, and says that consistency funded houses, a nanny and her new one-on-one coaching program.

Key takeaways

• She attributes her drive in part to her adolescence: her father’s addiction, revealed when she was 11, and her sister’s permanent brain injury when she was 13
• Her pre-Etsy career was in buying and product development, including work as a buyer for Zappos after college and then Zulily in Seattle
• The Etsy business started, she says, from a floral letter she made for her own wedding and listed a month before the wedding
• She claims she turned down a Petco job offer six months into the Etsy business and doubled down on Etsy instead
• She reports claimed annual sales rising from $134,000 in year one to $360,000 in 2020, then $320,000 in 2021 while raising prices and extending turnaround times

Episode details: published August 1, 2022 · 13:53 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dylan Jahraus’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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