Starting in high school, we had craft nights. This sparked our love for creating! We did everything from painting to maniacally cutting up canvases and putting light sources behind it.
After graduating college, Ashley decided to open an Etsy shop. Made By Moonlite was born! Initially, she sold leather bracelets. The shop started gaining some traction when she started calligraphy. She even did a large order for the Make A Wish foundation one time!
Eventually, our craft nights became more frequent. We started getting into macrame and weaving and got pretty good at it. We started participating in markets - these pictures are kinda embarrassing to show… But everybody starts somewhere!
We found out that kid & baby stuff seemed to sell well. We started making felt flowers and added these to headbands that were stretchy enough to fit our own heads but could also fit infant heads. We decided we were Made By Moonlite - florals & fibers for a while.
We also sold mobiles, calligraphy wall art, and embroidery for a while. Mini macrame plant hangers popped off for a couple years. Our booth for markets leveled up a lot too! We transitioned to Made By Moonlite fiber arts.
One craft night, we decided to make some earrings. It started off exclusively with macrame earrings that were admittedly QUITE rough. We eventually found our stride and took some decent pics. Our first very successful earrings were these triangle macrame earrings.
We spent our entire weekends, every single week, slinging out orders as fast as we could. This went on for one very exhausting year. Finally, Ashley decided to make this her full time endeavor! She took a leap of faith and quit her full time job as a mental health clinician.
We kept doing pretty well selling earrings! Our next big seller was the macrame hoops, then squares.
We even came across some people who tried to steal our work! They copy-pasted our listing. This happened a few times. One time, our repeat customer recognized our pics on a different shop’s website! Imitation is the best form of flattery or something… right? LOL
We decided to try commission sales at a local boutique.. Honestly this was a waste of time and money (except for learning more about display making)! We made way less than we spent for this endeavor.
We kept doing shows during this time too. Our booth got better (thank god)
Macrame was great, but we wanted to branch out. We started with clay earrings. These clay pot earrings were a big hit.
The clay pots brought about the macrame plant hangers.
We kept rolling with the plant themed earrings for a while. We already knew we liked embroidery, so we utilized that on an earring-sized scale.
Hand-stitched embroidery was a crazy amount of time, and we invested in an embroidery machine. The software was insane to learn & honestly we’re still learning!
Then we got into “Shrinky Dinks”
“Shrinky Dinks” brought us to resin, which we learned had a pretty wide range! We made some stained glass themed earrings, this incorporated both clay and resin!
The clay ended up being wildly difficult to work with and keep consistent. We got a new toy! This time a 3d printer. Another new software for Ashley to learn! 4 software programs, actually. But this opened up a lot of possibilities for us!
We wanted our work to continue to be mostly handmade. Even though Ashley designed the 3d printed pots from scratch, it felt kinda weird utilizing our new toy instead of clay. We wanted to add another handmade element to the earrings. So we got another toy! This time an airbrush.
We leaned into plant themed earrings pretty hard, but also started playing with the stained glass theme more. The printed stained glass outlines were way more easy to work with than the clay outlines.
During our exploration time, Etsy started falling off. More and more drop shippers were allowed to put shops on the site and the handmade aspect started to be less & less important. Our sales dropped off. This was so frustrating! We decided to take matters into our own hands and get off the Etsy grind. We rebranded & became Odd Pair Studio and decided to make our own website instead of relying on Etsy to drive our traffic.
We kept doing in person shows too! Booth still leveling up! We thought about selling booth market set ups. We’d learned a lot over the past several years!
Our first show as Odd Pair Studio went great! We wanted to translate the in person success to our social media AND to our brand new website.