Surprise, I AM starting a blog (again)! So I guess the title should really be: Am I crazy to start a blog in 2021?
But let's back up a bit and let me introduce myself and what I'm doing here.
In 2012 I started a little blog called ElizabethAve, where I, Elizabeth, would share all my DIY projects and sewing tutorials. It was the wild west of blogging back then and I did whatevertheheck I wanted. After a couple years, I started to get a few sponsorships and made a bit of money doing the whole blogging thing. Then I made a few naive website mistakes and within minutes lost all my website data!
If you ask me now, I am pretty sure there were ways to recover it... but I didn't know what I didn't know back then, and since I wasn't becoming a millionaire doing it, I decided to let it go for a time.
It turns out, that mistake sent me down a different path of entrepreneurship, and it has been amazing!
This May is my 4th anniversary of starting Sage Textile Co., a shop that sells handmade decor pillows that have a cozy home feel. This business was the follow up endeavor to my blogging debacle. I started it on Etsy, and over the years it has grown little by little into a full time career. I now sell $6000+ dollars in pillows every freaking month! (My mind is still blown!) But it's not just a business to me. Ultimately it has become the catalyst for so much personal growth. I have learned to become more goal oriented, organized, and consistent. I've learned to start and stop different projects in order to manage my business/home life balance. This is really the growth I had needed.
When I was blogging in 2012, I had the mindset of "once you start something, everything else goes on the back burner until it's complete." So if I started painting a dresser or sewing a dress, I would work on it until the wee hours of the morning to get it done. I wouldn't come up for air. And that mindset ultimately left me burnt out and inconsistent.
I am still working on this trait, but my business has helped me improve this a lot! We have more money now, for one thing, which can help settle your mind and provide security. And along the same vein, because I get paid for purchases, I must follow through. My conscience won't allow me to procrastinate or be inconsistent, for the sake of my paying customers.
Isn't it sad that as humans, we are often willing to let ourselves down? We won't be inconsistent with others, but we will be inconsistent with ourselves. This is what I'm working on now, and one reason for starting this blog.
My goal for Sage House is to have another outlet for my DIY-entrepreneur-self. It is going to be an extension of Sage Textile Co., where I can share tidbits about my business, give my customers a resource for pillow inserts and styling tips, and share my personal home projects that aren't necessarily related to pillows. Essentially it's a HOME DECOR blog.
(As if there aren't enough of those already, haha.)
But honestly, that is my biggest hesitation in blogging. There are ten billion and one blogs out there already, so 2021 seems like a poor time to be starting from scratch. But my guess is that 10 years from now someone will be saying they wished they had started in 2021. SO HERE I GO AGAIN!
I'm happy you're here.
xoxo, Elizabeth
COMING UP:
Sage Textile Co. is celebrating 4 YEARS, with a new website and big sale!
We've got a bathroom renovation on the loose in our house, so I'm excited to share our plans in that space! (Think tiny but very strategic!)
Buying Guide: Where to buy pillow inserts for all our best pillow sizes!
Comments