Last year, international orders finally started coming in for my handmade macrame jewelry. Five or six of them, over about a month, on Etsy. Not a flood, but real — enough that I let myself believe something was actually working.
Then, right around late August into September, US tariffs went up. Customs tightened. Almost overnight, shipping to the US stopped making sense for a lot of small sellers, myself included. I had to stop.
What came after that is the part I don't usually say out loud.
I didn't just pause and regroup. I tried a couple of different things, in fairly quick succession:
- A second Etsy shop, this time for digital art prints. It didn't work. I have real admiration for people who can build something like that — it just needed more sustained focus than I gave it before my attention moved on.
- A two-month trip to Thailand, partly to explore building a market there. I love Thailand, and I'd go back in a heartbeat. But I decided against actually selling while I was there — the local rules around foreigners running markets had tightened recently, and I wasn't willing to risk it, even informally. If I'm honest, there was a second layer to it too: the kind of selling that seemed to work there ran on a very social, outgoing rapport-building I don't naturally have. That's maybe its own thing worth sitting with — not a flaw exactly, but something I might want to outgrow a little.
- Coming back to India, and, not long after, an unexpected opportunity to learn silversmithing properly — which is the one thing from this whole stretch that actually stuck
The honest lesson
I should have done my research before jumping into either of those. And even now, saying that, I still find market research genuinely uncomfortable. My mind is a creative one — it wants to make, not study a market before making. Most of the time, I go with the flow and figure it out as I go. I'm slowly, slowly trying to do this more deliberately now — but "slowly" is the honest word. It takes real time to do it right, and at the same time, I do need this to make money now, not eventually. That tension doesn't resolve neatly. It's just there.
What I do have, from all of this, are the silver and mixed-metal pieces I made this year — my first ones, still a little rough, sitting for now among the Unique Finds. First attempts always are. But I'm genuinely proud of them, and next year, I want to build a real, deliberate practice around silversmithing instead of a scattered one.
The pattern underneath it
Underneath these attempts is the same pattern, and I'm only now able to name it clearly — the same one I wrote about in the first part of this reflection: I don't know how to want just one thing at a time. Etsy jewelry, then digital prints, then a market in another country, then silver — each one genuinely exciting in the moment, and I still can't always tell, while I'm in it, whether an idea is real or just new.
The test I'm slowly building for myself: does this still feel true a week later, once the initial excitement wears off? Not "am I still a little interested" — almost everything passes that bar. More: would I still choose this if the shiny part were gone today? Silversmithing passed that test. A few other ideas since then haven't. I don't have a clean rule yet. Just a slightly better question than the one I used to ask, which was no question at all.
Where this actually leaves the business
Here's the part I want to say plainly, because it's easy to read a story like this and hear only the mess: every piece currently in the Spirit Collection — Sāmya, Selene, the sunstone and moonstone pieces people have actually chosen to wear — was made during these same scattered years, not despite them. The test I'm building isn't a fix for the scatter. It's what lets the real ideas survive it. That's not nothing. That's the actual method behind wearing your spirit rather than a tidy brand story about focus I don't have yet.
I don't have this fully figured out. But I know what's stayed, and I know what I'm building next — a slower, more intentional silversmithing practice, one piece at a time, using the same test that's already worked once.
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