We recently connected with Jim & Jenny Penny and have shared our conversation below.

Jim & Jenny, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with your mission – what is it and what’s the story behind why it’s your mission?

We started our business in December of 2021 to help raise money to adopt a baby. We have wanted a family of our own for a long time but found we could not conceive in late 2020. After much reflection and prayer, we decided to pursue the adoption of a newborn. With adoption costs being so high we knew we wouldn’t have the money upfront to cover all the expenses and fees. We started with a gofundme page and donations from our church but we knew we had to do more. We decided to take our love of crafting and start a small side business. We love animals and knew we wanted to have a name reflecting that. Jim suggested we name the business after our dog Scamper, who passed away from cancer in 2015. Thus, Designs By Scamper was born.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

We started this business to help with adoption costs and although it hasn’t covered them completely, it has helped to ease a little of the financial burden. It took a long time to raise them though and ate away at our adoption contract time. By the time we were able to submit for situations, most of the contract had passed by and we needed to renew soon. Currently, through donations, whatever extra money we could scrape up, and the business, we have raised just enough money to adopt a baby in Ohio. We are still waiting to be matched. We both still work full time jobs and then work the business in the evenings and on weekends. It gets exhausting at times but we love making gifts and know the struggle will be worth it the day we hold our baby in our arms.

We are most proud of the quality of the items we offer. We try to be unique with what we make and we hold ourselves to a high standard when it comes to the quality of the item we are selling. We want to make sure the items we sell make people happy and are worth the hard earned money they spent on them.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

We have worked hard to build a good reputation within the crafting community. We’ve only been in business for 2 yrs and have had to work hard to get our name out there. When we started out we knew we wanted to make things but we didn’t know what. We tried making a little bit of everything but found items that sold well for others just didn’t sell well for us or in our area. It was definitely trial and error with a big learning curve. One thing we knew was if we were going to sell items, we wanted to make sure they were something we would be happy with if we had bought it with our own money as a consumer. Making unique items and holding ourselves to a high standard of quality has blessed us with loyal customers. Although we do still make a wide variety of gifts, our best known items are our suncatchers. In our area, there aren’t any other crafters that do it quite like we do so we are able to stand out over the crowd a little bit. We get requests for new ones and our suncatcher line has grown from the 6 initial options to now over 47 (not including the different varieties within some of the designs).

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

When we started out we did not have a website yet so we had a few listings on Etsy. We then researched and tried a few website builders to see how we could build one of our own so as not to have to deal with the Etsy fees on top of everything else. After much trial and error we settled on one we liked and built our website out. We manage our ecommerce there as well as letting people know what upcoming events we will be at locally and other news we may have. We still do have listings on Etsy and have become a star seller there. The nice thing about Etsy is the traffic you can achieve if you are higher in the listings. We would rather people shop on our website since it has the full catalog but we still struggle to get traffic there so, in the meantime, Etsy definitely helps.

Another site that helps is our Trunk inventory system. It manages stock across Etsy, and our website. Since our website inventory is tied to the stock we sell at craft shows, every sale at a show is reflected and changed in the related Etsy or website inventory so we don’t have to have multiple inventory trackers. I would really recommend this system to other small business owners who use ecommerce for sales. It has made our lives so much easier.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.designsbyscamper.com/
• Instagram: @designsbyscamper
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/designsbyscamper