09/08/2026
After having our two daughters practically back-to-back, I was fortunate enough that I didn’t technically need to work. Which sounds lovely until you discover that having no adult professional identity whatsoever can make a certain kind of person start vibrating through the walls.
Not to mention extra money and extra sanity is always nice… Enter manic postpartum entrepreneurship.
It didn’t start as a business. It started as an Etsy shop.
That distinction mattered to me for a very long time.
“I have an Etsy shop” felt easy to say. People understood it. It was cute. Harmless. Crafty.
“I own a business” felt like trying to pretend to be something I wasn’t which oddly enough was more inaccurate since I was technically starting and running a business.
For years, when someone at a party asked what I did, it was easier to say I was a stay-at-home mom than to attempt an explanation of whatever increasingly complicated thing was happening on my laptop. - finish reading on my Substack link in bio
https://erinjames.substack.com/p/why-i-left-etsy-a-descent-into-solo?r=8vsro1&utm_medium=ios
