We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sharvari Vaidya a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Sharvari, thanks for joining us today. Risk taking is something we’re really interested in and we’d love to hear the story of a risk you’ve taken.
I was working a full time regular job when and felt emptiness in it, even though I was great at what i was doing it didn’t bring me happiness. Fast forward to 2020 right after Covid hit and I started working from home I decided to purchase a die cut machine. To start, I first made some home decor items on it and gifted to friends and family . Soon enough people started asking me if they could get more and gift to other people. I was thrilled! I started making more items and launched my Etsy store in September 2020. People responded to one of my items extremely well and soon I was making 30-50 of those on a regular basis. This was when i realized the potential in my business and even though my job paid my bills I just didn’t find it fulfilling enough so thats when I talked to my family and decided to take a risk and become a full time small business owner. January 2021 is when I started this journey as a full time small business owner and this ride has been extremely wild and very fulfilling.
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 back background and context?
My name is Sharvari but people call me Shar, I am a small business owner that sells Aesthetic Glassware Cute Tees Keychains and more.. A few years ago I made a conscious decision of moving away from plastic products because I truly believe that plastic does not go well with our internal system . Slowly I disposed of all plastic from our house and bought in all glass products for the household . After seeing a blank glass can on an influencers website I was very curious about it and immediately ordered some for myself. I started decorating them and i saw immense potential ! I will say once once you drink from a glass cup with a glass straw you will not go back to anything else . Even water tastes better that way! I have served many customers by now and I love the fact that I have converted so many customers to use glass rather than plastic. I am extremely proud to say that I started selling glassware in September 2021 and have sold over a 1000 cups by now and NVDSIGNZ cups can now be found in 4 store fronts in AZ and two other states.
We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?
I started my social media journey right after the business was started . For a year I struggled to get followers and traction from it. I had almost given up on it because I didn’t take the time to understand what I needed to do . After earning 1k followers in a year I decided to change my strategy and decided to embrace video content. Thats where I started seeing the difference. Initially i would take hours to make one video ensuring it was perfect but as time went on I learnt people don’t care for perfection what they cared was your personality and your uniqueness! After I posted videos consistently for 5/6 weeks i started seeing the growth and my followers grew. On January 2022 I only had 1k followers but as of October 2022 I have over 10.5k followers. My advice to anyone trying to build their audience will be to focus on one platform at a time, be unique and don’t wait for a perfect video/post/story. Even though building a large audience takes time being consistent is key!
How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.
NVDSIGNZ was first started on Etsy and the reason to choose Etsy over its competitors are :
Pros:
1)Low listing fees
2)Built in Audience
3)Dont need to drive your own traffic
Cons:
1)Increase in transaction fees almost every year
2)Can be a little saturated
3) You need to work hard to have your listings stand out
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nvdsignz.com
- Instagram: @nvdsignz