This Etsy Shop Made 48,900 Sales Without Designing the Art (Steal This Store #5)

About this video

Provenance note: transcript track is in Arabic, summary below is in English. This is episode 5 of the creator’s ‘Steal This Store’ series, profiling Mug Voyage Co, an Etsy shop the creator says is a year and a half old with 48,900 sales shown on its own Etsy page, selling print-on-demand shirts, mugs and ornaments via Printify. The core model is a single vintage photo-frame template with a year and a blank centre: the buyer uploads their own photo of a child, dad or graduate, so the shop does not design most of what it sells. Each relationship becomes its own listing and its own search term; the graduate version is the best seller, cited with 349 reviews and an EverBee estimate of about 650 sales last month at five months old, and a dad shirt is cited as bought by 10 people in the past 24 hours. Ornaments are 488 listings, about a third of the shop, led by a baby’s first Christmas ornament with 262 reviews, offered flat, 3D or shaker style in four sizes with 11 prices from about $7 to about $27. The creator calls out a pricing trick he says he would not copy: listings show $3.99 in search, but that is a bow accessory, not the ornament, and a similar sticker trick applies to the dad shirt, which starts around $12; he also notes a separate $5 preview listing. He gives a three-step build: make the frame in a free editor at print size, place the same file on a shirt and an ornament in Printify as drafts, then add Etsy’s custom options, including a file-upload field (he says Etsy allows up to five custom fields) and a text box for the year, following Etsy’s rules that the main photo must show a finished personalised product and buyer uploads must be their own photos.

Key takeaways

• Build one vintage photo-frame template and let the buyer’s uploaded photo be the design, instead of creating art for every product.
• Give every relationship its own listing (dad, graduate, dance mum, sisters, uncle and more) so each becomes a separate search term on the same underlying file.
• Use Etsy’s custom options with a file-upload field so buyer photos attach to the order, rather than chasing buyers for images in messages.
• Extend the same photo idea to Christmas ornaments for Q4, with multiple styles and sizes; the profiled shop has 488 ornament listings.
• Avoid the $3.99 accessory pricing trick the creator flags, and follow Etsy’s rules: main photo shows a finished personalised product and uploads must be the buyer’s own photos.

Episode details: published October 13, 2026 · 6:18 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are RJ Martinez’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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