In 2019, my co-founder Matthew and I were selling other people’s brands on Amazon, and we wanted to build something of our own. When we looked at the craft space, no one was really making products for crafters. Most of it came from large manufacturers that treated their products as commodities, and even our competitors were selling mass-produced items that didn’t solve the needs of scrapbookers and card makers. So our first product was a precision craft glue with interchangeable tips that’s archival and acid-free.

What sets us apart is that we’re trying to inspire creativity, not just sell supplies. You don’t have to be creative to be a crafter, and you don’t have to be an artist to make something beautiful. Between our products, hundreds of free designs and the free tools on our website, we try to show people they can create beautiful things themselves.

We didn’t pay for influencer marketing. Instead, we gave away the first few hundred units of our glue to everyday crafters with very little following, no strings attached. As people learned the product and loved it, it snowballed, and bigger influencers started working with us because they were genuine fans, not because we paid them.

Today, most of our new business comes from expanding into more retail stores and from personal connections. We’re now carried in more than 200 stores in 15+ countries.

The decision was quitting my engineering job to go all in. At the time we were paying ourselves about $3 an hour and working 80 to 100 hour weeks, but nothing else let me create something from nothing the way the business did.

The mistake was one of our first products, a cloud-shaped toilet paper shelf. We spent a lot of time learning how to make it, and it sold well at almost $100. Then we got a cease and desist letter from a company with a similar cloud shelf. The materials and design were clearly different, but we abandoned the project anyway. It still taught us more than anything else. It was our first time sourcing materials, negotiating with manufacturers and building a listing and a brand from scratch, and Bearly Art wouldn’t exist without what we learned there.

The craft industry is old and lags behind most others. Online selling was still new here when the rest of retail had already moved past it. The big change in the last couple of years has been AI, and the creative community is wary of it. I think there’s a right way and a wrong way to use it. It’s fine for brainstorming, but you can still tell when it made the final piece.

So we use it behind the scenes. We’ve used AI to build our own tools for reporting, accounting, inventory, purchasing and reconciliation, which cut our software costs from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds. We also capture and own all of our own data now.

Start before you have the perfect idea. Your first idea is never the best one, but go with it anyway, because you’ll learn more from doing than from overthinking. Just make sure you’re working on things that move the needle, because being busy isn’t the same as being efficient.

Ignore the idea that a niche is too small or unglamorous. If you can own a small niche, it can be big for you. We built a multi-million dollar brand off a glue, and there are other niches in this industry worth millions too. The good news about an older industry is that your competitors are slow.