Featured Team Member - My Paper Garden

Meet Team Leader Lisa Presley - "and yes my middle name IS Marie" - of My Paper Garden.  She is an artisan and massage therapist, from Spring Hill, KS, which is about 40 minutes south of Kansas City.

Xenon Comic Pages E-reader/Kindle Cover

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Like so many other women, my first and favorite job is being a Mom. I have 2 children, 9 and 14 and this summer will have been married 25 years.  

My day job is as a Licensed Massage Therapist. I am grateful to have been able to do this for 17 years now with many of the same clients for the entire time. I love reading the Etsy “how to quit your day job” pieces but could never do it myself. I love my job! I will still be giving massages for as long as my hands will let me.  The flexibility of being able to schedule my own appointments has been a blessing with raising kids and now also with running my Etsy shop.

2. Tell us about what you were doing before you started your Etsy shop.  I had reached an age where many women start to really embrace their creative side. Only most women of this age don’t also have children in elementary school!  With my ME time usually only coming late at night I wanted to find an outlet to create and sell but not have it cut into my family time.  When I found Etsy it was a dream come true. I took off running and have never regretted it.

Checkbook Cover/Cash Wallet

3. When did you first discover your creative potential?  I am a typical right brained person, so I have always had some type of creative project going. You name the craft and most likely I have tried it or learned about it at some time.

4. How did you get started in your chosen craft? In 2006 I started an Etsy shop Daisy and Jane for traditional sewing, selling accessories like totes, purses, wallets, headbands, journal covers etc. I quickly saw that Etsy was loaded with other shops just like mine and there was nothing about my items that made them stand out from the others.  I stuck with it with some success for a while but realized I needed to do something different. I then started My Paper Garden and started by selling original collage art and cards using vintage papers. It has since evolved into a combination of the two shops with my current line of vintage paper and vinyl accessories

5. Which piece in your shop is your current favorite, and why? Anything made with a map, which is most every item!  I love to travel but have never made it out of the US, yet. I totally romanticize the item I am working on by studying the particular atlas page as if I was a tourist and thinking about the buyer and where they might be from or traveling to.  This daydreaming is very bad for production but I am now a smarty pants with geography!

Passport Travel Wallet

6. What are you currently working on?  Just trying to keep some listings in my shop.    I am grateful for a couple of fabulous features lately which have been great for sales but left me with very few items in my shop.  My New Year’s resolution of building a strong inventory has yet to be realized.

7. What do you do when you're not crafting? I love flea markets, antique stores, reading, family nite, and unfortunately the time drain of computer surfing.

8. Is there anything you would like to share with those who are looking to build their Etsy business? Great customer service can never be over rated. My day job of being a massage therapist is all about my client and making sure they have the best experience possible. This comes easy to me. I try to put that same effort into my Etsy shop and hope it comes across to the shopper.
 

Butterfly Note Cards

9. If you could only give one piece of advice or information, what would that be? Find what you love to do and then put a spin on it to make it truly your own. To survive selling on the internet you need to either sell the hottest trends that everyone wants or something unique and different that people might not even know they want until they see it. And I think it is it is way more fun to be unique and different!