Emily Odio-Sutton started her Etsy side hustle on her couch while watching a “Real Housewives” TV show in December 2022. She doesn’t recall which one, but she does remember the months of research fed into that moment.
Her oldest daughter would start kindergarten the following year, and she knew she couldn’t leave her 9-to-5 job in the middle of the day — even though it was a remote gig — for school pickups, or gymnastics or swimming practice drop-offs.
Amid her “doomscrolling,” Odio-Sutton found a series of YouTube videos about print-on-demand — an e-commerce method where sellers create designs for products like T-shirts, tote bags and mugs, and list them on online marketplaces like Etsy or Amazon. When a customer places an order, a third-party manufacturer prints the design onto the product and ships it out.
Odio-Sutton decided to give it a try. Her shop, which specializes in gifts for people with hyper-specific jobs or hobbies, has brought in at least $236,000 in revenue so far in 2024 — more than $26,200 per month, on average — according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. She’s already outpaced her sales for the entirety of last year.
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In her best month so far, the side hustle — which takes roughly 10 hours per week, she says — brought in $54,900. About a third of her shop’s revenue is profit, she estimates.
Odio-Sutton prefers not to name her Etsy shop, to prevent copycats — but its success helped her scale down her job as an internal operations manager at a children’s book publishing company to a part-time role this past summer. It padded her family’s finances, paying for vacations and her $20,000 in student loans, she says.
Here’s how Odio-Sutton experimented her way into a lucrative side hustle.
How I built my side hustle, paid off student loan debt
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