A lot of very famous and important people will come up to me on the street, or perhaps land in front of me in their helicopters, just to ask me how I got started with my Etsy business. So I thought, for Beyonce’s sake, that I should tell a little of my story.
Several years ago, before I opened my Etsy store, I was working at a creative agency. It was a particularly stressful environment, and I was doing so much unpaid overtime that often it equated to working a 7 day week. I was getting migraines every weekend, I was depressed, had no energy and was starting to clench and grind my lil pearly whites so badly in my sleep that the dentist recommended I wear a mouthguard - like some kind of elite sleep-athlete.
So a few months later, when I’d chewed through the first mouthguard, the dentist recommended I shell out for a sturdier one, one of a better quality - one that she could custom mold to hug my creamy pegs all for the tightly sum of 2 months rent and would probably last thrice as long.
So whilst the offer to spend my life savings on a chewable sleep ornament, (and a bonafide sex-repeller) was tempting, I thought to myself, maybe the problem here isn’t the grinding? Maybe I need to get to the root of the problem - the reason behind the grinding: my job. My body was trying to send me a sign, and it was subconsciously clenching and grinding that sign into my brain like a morse coded message. It was causing me so much stress that my health was being affected. And if I learned anything from my grandma growing up, it was that swearing in old age is (very) endearing and also to “Fuck everything - keep your health!”.
Her wisdom helped me take the plunge to quit my job, and to take some time off to recover. So like a pensioner ready for retirement, I sought warmer waters and calm surroundings. I took the money I saved by not following the dentists advice and bought a one way ticket to Europe - kind of like Julia Roberts in that movie, based on the book about all the eating, praying and loving - except with less yoga and heartbreak, and more processed meats, pickles and with my partner willingly in tow.
I spent the first couple of weeks abroad waking up every morning in a panic, not recognising the walls of the Airbnb’s I was staying at and thinking I was late for work (again). And it took a solid couple of weeks of being horizontally beached to really come back to life and start having the energy to do normal human things again. And once I started feeling better the creative ideas started flowing back in too. I started drawing every day and decided to keep a tally of how many days i could do in a row without breaking my streak - this little productivity trick is based entirely on Seinfeld’s “Don’t break the chain” method and really keeps you committed to the task (especially if you have some OCD issues like me).
So, I drew little pictures and left them for our Airbnb hosts, I documented our travels with little illustrated diary entries, I learnt to make illustrative patterns and I drew little weird and wacky things I had seen or overheard whilst travelling. And on super busy days, or when I was just getting to bed as the sun was coming up, sometimes already hungover or maybe sleeping in a 12 person hostel dorm, I would force myself to draw - sometimes with only the light of my phone illuminating the page, all so that I didn’t break my streak (and so that the world as I knew it wouldn’t collapse; hello OCD my old friend.)
About 60 days into my streak we were staying with a good friend in London, who had lovingly demanded that she wanted a drawing of herself and her boyfriend before we left the country. And thus the romantic beginnings of my first ever portrait commission!
I had signed up for an Etsy shop when I first heard about the site back in 2011, but it had sat there ever since, empty and inactive - (not unlike my bank account after this jobless trek around Europe). And with a spontaneous decision I decided to list the portrait in my store and see if anyone else was interested.
And just as fate would have it my first order came in, conveniently as I boarded an 18 hour overnight ferry from Tallinn to Stockholm. So I got to work and spent most of the journey in the ferry-cafe, with my drawing tablet balanced on my knee, sketching up my first order. The sea got a bit ragey (coffee sliding off the table ragey) around midnight, so I was forced to call it a night, get horizontal and try not to be sick all over myself before morning (I think that night was still one of my top 5 most difficult remote working experiences to date). We continued travelling for a few more months, and I worked on custom illustrations every stop of the way. As long as I had wifi, my wacom tablet and my laptop I was able to fulfill my orders. And by the time I returned home to Melbourne, just in time for Christmas, I had enough new orders coming in to keep me occupied full-time! It’s now been almost been three years since that first trip and since then my partner and I have taken our work on the road many times. We have spent several months at time working remotely and living in various locations, both inside and outside of Australia, which has been a whole other adventure that I might leave for the another post.
