We recently connected with Alex Mancini and have shared our conversation below.

Alex, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

I had a really half-baked idea in my mind that I wanted to do something creative that involved making things and selling them, and I wanted to have my own business. This was a messy period of time where my wife and I were both coming up with various different products, thinking that we were going to sell them all under one business (she already had a side craft business on Etsy). Once we started playing around with things, I quickly realized that I wanted to make things for the queer community. It was something that was important to me, part of my identity, and I knew I would never get tired of it. That was when I decided to put all those products under my own business, Crafty Queer Studio. Figuring out the name was tricky, because my immediate idea was Crafty Queer, but that was taken. I couldn’t think of anything I liked more that would still instantly tell you what the business was about, so I stuck “Studio” on the end to also give myself room to expand into any kind of creative process down the road. Once I had settled on my starting products – at the time it was only necklaces I made myself out of shrink plastic – I designed a logo, ordered some business cards, I opened an Etsy shop (I now have my own website), made a Facebook and an Instagram account, and started feeding my brain as much business and creative hustle information as I could. I looked at tons of online resources as well as business and creative podcasts; I just soaked it up anywhere I could get it. Looking back, I basically started before I was “ready” – I don’t think you’re ever “ready,” you just have to START. Once I started, that helped keep a fire under my butt to keep going because now I had a THING that I had to work on, it was no longer just sitting in my head. I started signing up for fairs and markets in my area. It was a very slow and steady progression from there. At the time I was doing this on the side of my dayjob.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I’ve always been an an artist my entire life, in some form or another. I’ve always been creative. As I moved into my 20s I had been doing mostly photography, which is what I went to college for, but I was beginning to feel like I wanted to pursue other creative outlets. It took years to figure out, but eventually I realized I wanted to work for myself and I wanted it to be something creative that also made a difference to others. It was hard to figure out the Venn Diagram of those things for a while, until I started just playing around with ideas and products in our studio at home (which was our dining room) using mostly my wife’s art supplies since she’s even craftier than I am. Once I was DOING something, making an effort to just get into things and try different ideas out – that was when it clicked. Somewhere in that process was where I realized, my queer identity is an incredibly important and huge part of who I am (and was already the focus of my photography practice), and an incredibly important part of other folks’ identities as well. I realized I could create things for my community, to make them feel seen and loved and respected, and fulfill that Venn Diagram of goals I had for myself. What I think sets me apart is the humor I put into my work, my art style, and my inclusiveness. It was important to me that I have something for everyone, and so I try to have a large span of pride flags available across various products in addition to the illustrations I make. My goal is for someone to see my products and immediately think, “Oh, that’s me! That was made for me!” It’s SO rewarding and exciting when I am in person at pop-ups and events and people come up to the table and literally say that out loud. I also make a range of ally products, because I believe it’s also important for us to be able to see small visual reminders that there are people who love and support us out there in the world.

Can you talk to us about manufacturing? How’d you figure it all out? We’d love to hear the story.

My products are created in a variety of ways. I have slowly added products over time, so it’s been a steady learning process as I go where I usually need to learn something new each time I want to make something new. When I first started, I was making necklaces from shrink plastic – there’s a type you can run through your printer and print graphics onto, so I was printing pride flags and fun words and then cutting them out and baking them in my oven. I would then back them with an aluminum piece and string them on a simple pleather cord. Those were time-consuming and frustrating to make, but I had all the control and could make them as I needed them. Then I wanted to do pinback buttons – a lot of folks call them pins, but I call them buttons because when I hear “pins” I think of enamel pins – and luckily had a friend who was also a creative and had a button maker, so I bought some button pieces and borrowed her button maker for a short period of time to make a bunch of buttons and see if they sold. Once it was clear that people LOVE buttons, I invested in my own button maker which I still use today. So all the buttons are made 100% in-house; I print them off on my (professional-grade that I got used on Craigslist) printer, punch them out, and press them myself.

Once I got into earrings, that’s when I started having to do a little more research into where to find the settings and cabochons I needed, what types of earrings would be easiest to make in large quantities, etc. because I’m always thinking about future scaling. I print out all my earrings designs on my printer, glue the cabochons down, cut them out, glue them into the settings, and voila. I’m still doing all the labor and the designing. For the stickers and keychains, I did a TON of research into an unbelievable number of sticker companies. I learned that very few companies outside of China can make custom acrylic pieces (but I did find one). But I spent a long time looking for the right sticker company, ordered many sample packs, did lots of math, and finally decided on the one I still use today.

The level I am at for manufacturing is small, but I think the idea still holds – you want to make sure you have a good relationship with them, and that they can produce in the quantity you need, at the quality you need, in the timeframe you need, for a price that works for you.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Crafty Queer Studio was technically a side hustle from 2018 to 2021, though the lines are a little blurry. I started CQS in October 2018, and quit my day job 3 months later at the end of the year. In hindsight, this was not a responsible decision. I had built up a small savings, probably 6 – 8 months of bills, and after the 4 month mark I was still nowhere near even close to making a living with CQS. I was very fortunate in that I had house-painting skills and a good friend who also had a history as a house painter, and we joined forces and did that for a little over 2 years, until the end of 2021. While we were doing that, I was slowly and steadily building up CQS. I think my timeline would have been a lot shorter if the pandemic had not happened, which I’m sure is the story for a lot of people. That obviously set me back quite a bit. I’m very grateful that I qualified for self-employed unemployment payments during the height of everything in 2020 – it’s the only reason I made it through. The majority of my income, as of right now, is from in-person events. I would say if anyone is interested in making a living, or even just a really decent side income, from physical products, in-person events can be a game-changer if you do them regularly. It took a while – and it’s still a work in progress – to figure out exactly which events were right for my business. (Don’t just sign up for everything! Some are not the right fit!) I do 30 – 40 events a year. I’m trying to cut this number down, so I’ve been slowly trying to grow the wholesale side of my business as well as bulk orders for organizations and things like that. I stopped painting and went actual full-time with CQS once I had a full year of livable income under my belt that was exclusively from CQS. It was small, but it was enough, and I knew that in order to grow CQS to where I wanted it to be, I had to devote all my time to it. That second leap felt much more stable; I had a proven history of what I could achieve, and I had savings in the bank if it got a little lean. So far in 2022 I’ve continued my slow and steady growth. So, if you were to look at the graph of my business since its inception, you’d see that it very much did not “start” or “take off” when I quit my day job. I had to pivot (painting houses) and endure setbacks (the pandemic). But I just kept on, doing what I was doing as best as I could do it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.craftyqueerstudio.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/craftyqueerstudio/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/craftyqueerstudio/

Image Credits
I took all these photos! (C) Alex Mancini