No Time Like The Gift

So how did this come about? And why am I only writing about it now? Grab a cup of tea and I’ll tell you a story.

It was 2017 and I’d spent a year or two playing around making things - a bit of woodworking, the odd little electronics project and so on. I’d got in my head that I wanted to learn to code and make little robots, and after a bit of tinkering I decided I needed a 3d printer. I didn’t have the kind of spare cash that would mean I could just go and buy something like that though, so I spent months building up Amazon credit with receipt-scanning apps and survey sites.

In October 2018 I finally had enough and ordered an Anet A8. It was junk, essentially, but it worked. I printed a few things that I found online, but decided pretty quickly that I wanted to make myself a Now Playing stand for my records, so I had a play around with TinkerCAD and made myself one.

I was really pleased with it. It took about 6 hours to print and cost about 50p in material, and I could make them in whatever colour I wanted… although I only had a few colours at the time, because I was paying for it all myself. But what if I sold them? Then I could use the money to buy more colours. So I set up an Etsy shop.

The name happened because I hadn’t thought of one before I started the Etsy set-up process and had to think of one before I could finish it, and it’s what came to mind. No time like the present. Gift.

It actually started quite quickly. I sold my first one within a week, and by the middle of December I had a backlog of Christmas orders. In fact, I think I posted the last of my pre-Christmas orders sometime towards the end of January 2019. And I used the money I made to buy a better printer - a Prusa Mk3.

And not long after that, Covid happened. Billions of people sitting at home, spending money online. Me, working from home in my day-job but with a side-hustle that only needed a bit of time packing orders. It went well. Within a few weeks it was really clear I needed more printers, so I bought another 3, and over the next few months I took thousands of orders. By this time I’d added a whole range of display stands, shelves and dividers, and before long I needed more machines… and somewhere other than my house to put them.

I rented a unit nearby, bought another 4 printers, and watched the orders pile in. I was working full-time in my day job and regularly packing orders until 1 in the morning to keep on top of it all. I won’t bore you with all the numbers, but my biggest day was 146 orders and if it dropped below 210 orders a week, I wondered if it was all going wrong.

Eventually, it kinda did. But I’ll save that for another post.