Around 2011 a friend of mine approached me asking for custom party designs for her husband's surprise 40th birthday. She sent me a link to a page that was on Etsy. It was a page for digital party supplies that had a golfer theme. I agreed to create it for her which isn’t really relevant to this story because what I got out of it was that link. After I did the work for her I investigated the link. That was when I realized this woman was selling digital party files! I thought, “Hey, wait a minute, I can do this.” In October of 2011 I started my Etsy shop.
Metro-events was the name that I chose because someone else already had Metro-designs, I wanted to somehow keep my name so I decided why not just use events, it works.
I also wanted to make sure you could see that the two websites were related so Metro has sort of become my signature. Why Metro? Really, it’s as simple as a photograph. When I was studying at the Art Institute of Los Angeles I had an assignment where I got this random word and I had to create a design mocking a photograph. For some reason that assignment stuck with me so when I was renaming my business I thought Metro, YES!
So back to my Etsy shop, I made my first sale within the first week of having my shop up. I was so excited! This was my first sale:
After the first one I started getting orders every couple of days. I couldn’t believe people liked my designs so much! I was so grateful too, you have no idea! Right before I created my Etsy shop I had just gotten ripped off by a client, she owed me $1500 and I got nothing. I spent 2 weeks on a project to get $0 for doing it, I was in financial ruins! I had $37 in my bank account and I used $13 of it to start my Etsy shop. I made that $13 back within the first week. In the first 2 months I had 27 sales and it was during the holidays so I was off to a good start.