<story><title>Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month</title><url>https://www.starterstory.com/stories/fridays-off-fabric-shop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fabricexpert</author><text>I run an almost identical fabric shop online. 20k&amp;#x2F;month revenue is great but remember this is not a SaaS with unlimited scale and low costs. It&amp;#x27;s actually a very traditional business model, and margins here are only going to about 20-30%, potentially a lot less if you have to pay for your storage space.&lt;p&gt;You buy the fabric, typically you&amp;#x27;ll double the price when selling to customers. Then you take off additional postage fees&amp;#x2F;packaging (note the flat fees on postage), payment fees (3-4%), discounts, returns, shopify monthly fees, accounting software etc.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ll spend about 50% of your day cutting &amp;amp; packing orders, taking them to the post office etc. (or you can employ someone to help) and the rest of the time taking shots for instagram, sourcing new suppliers, working on SEO&amp;#x2F;blogging and doing admin.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re good at marketing you can shift quite a lot of fabric, but it will take you about a year to get your stock levels up to a sustainable amount to pay yourself a wage. If you want a real shop front you will generate most of your profit from running classes as the costs for a high street store are significantly higher than shopify and you gain little in terms of footfall vs online traffic.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t a get rich quick model but over time it works well and is replicable at scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fridaysoff</author><text>Thanks for your insight. You&amp;#x27;re not too far off, but my margins are much higher - thank goodness. I&amp;#x27;ve been at this for 5 years and also have an employee who helps with all the cutting, packaging and shipping. I offer a flat rate shipping fee for small price orders anything under $45. Sales above $45 ship with a Canada Post calculated shipping rate. Good luck with your business :)</text></comment>
<story><title>Bootstrapping an Online Fabric Shop and Growing to $20k per month</title><url>https://www.starterstory.com/stories/fridays-off-fabric-shop</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fabricexpert</author><text>I run an almost identical fabric shop online. 20k&amp;#x2F;month revenue is great but remember this is not a SaaS with unlimited scale and low costs. It&amp;#x27;s actually a very traditional business model, and margins here are only going to about 20-30%, potentially a lot less if you have to pay for your storage space.&lt;p&gt;You buy the fabric, typically you&amp;#x27;ll double the price when selling to customers. Then you take off additional postage fees&amp;#x2F;packaging (note the flat fees on postage), payment fees (3-4%), discounts, returns, shopify monthly fees, accounting software etc.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;ll spend about 50% of your day cutting &amp;amp; packing orders, taking them to the post office etc. (or you can employ someone to help) and the rest of the time taking shots for instagram, sourcing new suppliers, working on SEO&amp;#x2F;blogging and doing admin.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re good at marketing you can shift quite a lot of fabric, but it will take you about a year to get your stock levels up to a sustainable amount to pay yourself a wage. If you want a real shop front you will generate most of your profit from running classes as the costs for a high street store are significantly higher than shopify and you gain little in terms of footfall vs online traffic.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t a get rich quick model but over time it works well and is replicable at scale.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anoncoward111</author><text>Nice, thanks for the numbers! At a certain point you start competing with Home Depot, Michaels, Walmart, Amazon, whoever. You are in the product retail business, rather than the manufacturing or services business.&lt;p&gt;I think if you get really good at streamlining your marketing (Instagram photos and landing pages) as well as your pick&amp;#x2F;pack&amp;#x2F;ship operations (i.e running a warehouse), then you can expand into multiple niches. Fabrics, clothes, prints, whatever is super niche and high margin and can&amp;#x27;t be found on the shelves of a big box store.</text></comment>