Shape of Sunshine, One Year In – Everything is Practicable
Around the first day of last August, I started my creative hustle and became a small business owner of Shape of Sunshine, LLC. I felt kind of ready - it was the warm sensation of excitement and anticipation mixed with a sobering splash of uncertainty. Sitting alone at my dining table with a coffee or two, I revived my long-vacated Etsy shop, renamed it to “Shape of Sunshine”, created matching Instagram and TikTok social media accounts. Commit.
After all, I’m in my joy-building era.
Learning new things brings me joy.
I was looking for something to challenge myself creatively and to stretch in different areas. Now the accountability sets in.
In the past 11 months, I made 161 sales and started earning my monthly Etsy “Star Seller” streak since May.
Why did I start this…again?
My brief stint with an Etsy shop in early 2016 concluded rather quickly due to my irrational fear (or simply, dread) of going to the post office.
Over the past decade, I’ve always known that my positive and occasionally quirky art had strong resonance among my social media friends. But I was comfortable in my corporate day job, plus nobody else in my family had been an entrepreneur – I couldn’t wrap my head around what that term meant, let alone taking on that identity. Starting a business and becoming an “owner” was beyond my wildest imagination.
This time, it’s different.
One global pandemic, one divorce, two lonely egg-freezing procedures, and a year of therapy propelled me to finally become my own best friend, a full person who doesn’t need anyone to “complete” her, and someone with overabundant joy that pouring into others’ cups is her natural state of being.
I’m braver. The irrational fear of going to the post office dissipated as I became more comfortable with doing things on my own. In the process of self-discovery, I also started reflecting on my self-limiting beliefs and wanted to improve my relationship with money and abundance.
I took a chance with free coaching sessions offered via work for an intro session with a business coach, Rodger. “Prove you can sell one before you plan to sell 100 or 1000,” Rodger shared his wisdom. Our subsequent work together has been tremendously transformative and empowering.
Rodger not only coached me on finding my own answers, but also shared his lessons learned and wisdom from his own business. Critically, he gave me the validation and confidence I needed to experiment and move forward in getting my business up and running.
5 Main Takeaways in Getting Started
What I now realize is that I’ve been practicing and applying old skills to new contexts throughout this business endeavor.
1.Clarify the real motivation behind the action.
Because money was not the main motivator for me, I wasn’t very motivated when I thought about pure financial outcome and the business remained a vague idea. It took a lot of discussions and reflections for me to finally clarify my true motivation – to try something new that’s challenging for me, to break self-limiting beliefs and improve my relationship with money (such as expanding beyond one stable income stream), to share my skills and interest, and, most importantly, to share a positive, mindful joy and empowerment to uplift others. Clarifying my motivation made a huge difference in enabling forward progress.
Surprisingly, or maybe unsurprisingly, those were also already part of the personal principles that I shared on my home page in 2020 – “Do good. Be kind. Stay curious. Spread joy.” Cheers to staying authentic and true to myself and values in this journey.
2. Find the right type of accountability you need for different situations.
For me, even though internal accountability is usually strong, external accountability produces faster progress and results at times. My business coach, Roger, served as an external accountability partner to keep me on track with our bi-weekly connects. We’d usually set goals at the end of each session with him asking “so what are you going to work on in the upcoming weeks?” Being able to answer that question kept me motivated in making real, concrete progress.
3. Turn a “disorganized” mental cloud to clear spreadsheet to-dos.
As this endeavor was so new, I didn’t know how to effectively start. I’m generally organized in my design work and files but somehow this felt different. Business ideas and tasks floated in my head and the mental swirl deterred me from taking meaningful forward actions. Once I downloaded ideas and logistical tasks into an organized list, my head was clear and my emotional burden lifted. Progress soon followed in other aspects like creating my brand, taking product photography, and preparing to sell online and offline.
Some of my very initial diagnostic notes from my coaching sessions.
4. Know the true cost of an item.
Business calculations is a pain for me because it’s not something I practice frequently. (Here I think it’s important to point out that it’s not because the task is intrinsically “difficult” but the lack of practice makes me feel less fluent in the task. With enough practice, we get better at things that seem difficult at first.)
My main skillsets are in the warm and fuzzy areas of creative thinking, design, problem-solving, and behavioral science. I can certainly be precise in aligning pixels…now I have to swim through lines of spreadsheets and do what?
Why is knowing the true cost important? (Admittedly my logical brain understands it but my emotional body is still recoiling and learning.) Knowing the true cost of each item helps me understand profit margin and reasonable prices for each item. Calculating the prices down to the cost of a piece of paper, taking all the shipping, packaging, and printing costs into consideration to understand my cost and profit is still something I will continue working on and ultimately builds my confidence as a small business owner.
5. With the right system, inventory management can be less intimidating and more scalable for the future.
Inventory management takes a lot of time to set up in the beginning. My brain got overwhelmed here as well and didn’t know how to begin even with premade spreadsheet templates. After breaking the big task down, I focused on a smaller initial list of inventories. Taking the first step of listing all my designs and categories of products, I then adopted a clever numeric system for categories and individual items Roger recommended. I relearned in this context that I didn’t have to start with a finished and polished end result. A sh*tty first draft enables subsequent iterations and editing – you gotta start first.
But is my inventory up-to-date? No.
Have I set time up in the near future to work on it? Also no.
A section of my Etsy shop with real photography and Figma mock-ups…obviously (my designer’s tool of choice).
Go Time: Experiments
All those practice and preparation cumulated to real actions and impacts such as launching my new business online. But selling virtually in the comfort of my home is also vastly different from selling in person, and it happens that I’m a believer of “comfort breeds laziness”. At the beginning of 2025, I made a stretch goal to sell at 10 in-person events.
I sold at one holiday market in Hayes Valley in San Francisco at the tail-end of 2024 before I was super ready. I did it anyways to get a sense of how it felt like to vend at a local market. Something about San Francisco being a world-famous metropolitan city that I grew up hearing about made this extra daring. Naturally, for 2025, I asked myself, “Can I 10× this?” – borrowing the cliché to try out in my own business.
At the time of this writing, I’ve fully booked my 10 events and completed 6, with a few new ones in the works, exceeding my stretch goal.
A row on my 2025 bingo card, idea courtesy of Vicky Knoop (design leader, artist, and friend who I look up to).
Many unexpected learnings emerged during my markets and I’m glad I put myself out there to experiment. So many wonderful stories and memories to share:
1. Know the timing of applying to markets.
One of the reasons why I only did one market at the end of last year was because many markets, especially big and well-known ones, were fully booked earlier in the year when applications opened. I was lucky enough to have come across MAUM Market, a market championing Asian American artists and markers, which had their applications open at the time. Learning from my experience last year, I kept an eye out for event vendor applications this year using Instagram and a spreadsheet as early as I could and snatched up a few market spots at the very beginning of the year.
This year, Head West Marketplace at the Ferry Building, one of my all-time favorite places in San Francisco, has been such a welcoming and energizing spot for me.
2. Organic connections and mutual support go a long way.
One day I was brainstorming with my coach on approaching my favorite neighborhood coffee shop, Golden Goat Coffee, where the shop owner and baristas really felt like my good friends. I committed to making progress but was extremely unsure about how to bring the topic up with them – I would hate to bruise the friendly regular customer–coffee friends relationship we’ve established if they were not ready for a collaboration. I could foresee this ask twirling in my stomach for months before I had the courage to bring it up.
The universe works in mysterious ways. The very next day, Kevin, one of the Golden Goat owners who I usually interacted with reached out to me floating the idea of an art pop-up at their shop. It felt like somehow the universe heard my message and responded back with next-day delivery. Everything aligned even if I hadn’t actually asked it out loud.
Drawing from what felt authentic to me in doing business, instead of pushing for things, I consulted Kevin to collaboratively brainstorm and asked for his recommendations on days and time I should do my art pop-up and, exceeding my expectations, we landed on a two-day pop-up instead of one.
Doing my very first in-personal selling of 2025 at Golden Goat, a familiar and happy place for me, built confidence and allowed me to iterate on products, display, signage, and many other aspects of in-person vending which was hugely important for my initial serious market endeavor.
Great memories from my first in-person vending at Golden Goat Coffee this year.
3. Soak up contextual insights from “on-the-job” learnings at the markets and other tabling neighbors.
Watching YouTube videos to learn and practice table setup before markets was helpful, but nothing beats the on-location, “on-the-job” learning at the markets themselves. I learned from my MAUM Market table-mate, @theflaturanussociety, who does quirky pottery to take notes of what was sold. This led me to taking notes of my sales in 2-hour increments at 6-hour markets for a breakdown of sales based on time of the day for more clarity and aftermarket triage.
Alex from @saseanworkshop at my second market, my first ever 10×10ft outdoor tent setup, gave me a generous amount of market insights, tips, and diagnosis of my market setup that productively influenced all my subsequent events.
Practicing talking with my customers also gave me data to refine my positioning and extract what truly resonated with me and my customers and what I wanted out of my creative hustle.
My most recent iteration of the “Why” behind my business.
4. Embrace activities you love and the community that already resonates will show up.
Sometimes growth doesn’t mean you have to go all out of the way for things to happen. Mine also happened while engaging with activities and communities that already energized me. My second serendipitous pop-up event happened at my favorite local pole studio, San Francisco Pole + Dance, when Amy, their founder, reached out and invited me. Again, opportunities happened while I was contemplating reaching out to them for a pop-up opportunity. Before that, one of my favorite pole teachers also reminded me to “always talk about what [I was] up to” so she could show up to support my markets. My pop-up at the studio turned out to be the most profitable I have been so far.
From other people’s genuine desire to support me, I learned to start being comfortable with talking about my creative hustle in conversations – talking about my business in a genuine way created awareness, interest, and support in my community while building my own confidence and pride in my progress.
5. Iterate with every market.
Growth takes time and experience. Recognizing that I wouldn’t be able to accomplish everything the first time, I framed each market as a learning opportunity and iterated with every single one on products, signage, displays, price sheets, and more. I observed and collected data on what resonated with people browsing at my table and incrementally built or changed things to improve their experience. That’s also why I’m capturing some of my notes here and looking to follow up with a more in-depth “Flops, Lessons Learned, and Tips” article as a part 2 for people who are recently looking to do markets but don’t know where to start.
A snippet from one of my recent markets.
Regardless of the sales or the crowd, I always told myself and others: “I’m happy to be here.”
To me, that truly reflects my focus on prioritizing qualitative, emotional satisfaction rather than quantitative, concrete profits. It’s also a result of an abundance mindset – I’m not at markets to compete with other vendors, I’m there because I have something valuable to share and I’m there to support other local businesses.
Is that mindset ultimately a great business strategy? I don’t know, but I know it aligns with my priorities as a person.
After all, I’m in my joy-building era.
Curiosity-led growth and trying unfamiliar things build joy for me.
From market 1 to market 6, I’m also tremendously grateful for all of my friends who showed up to support – setup, teardown, purchases, shoutouts, warm coffee, hugs – and for all my new friends that I had the pleasure to make and cheer for.
What’s next?
With the confidence and insights I’ve built, I can finally tackle something I’ve procrastinated on for almost a year – reaching out to local shops to see what it takes for them to carry a small part of my collection.
In the meantime, see you on Etsy or Instagram where I share my latest updates and behind-the-scene stories. Maybe I’ll see you at a local market, too!