Handmade Business Work From Home Office I Shipping Etsy Orders

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Visit the home office where I run my handmade business. For the last 13 years, I have been using this space as well as my basement to make all the clothing for Revival Ink Shirts. See my process for packing and shipping orders. Learn how you can make an office in a small space. Mine is just in the corner of my dining room!

Today I will be giving you a tour of my upstairs office where I pack and ship orders. The reason why I wanted to share my workspace with you, is to show how you can work from home with a handmade business even if you don't have a lot of space. You can really do it anywhere, I have a workshop downstairs in my basement where I do my screen printing. See the tour of my printing shop here.

Today I want to show you how I do things upstairs once I've printed my shirts and I'm ready to pack and ship them. I will just start with a quick tour of my space. My office is set up in the corner of my house. I will just show you how that looks really quick: this is my kitchen, so starting there if we just pan around you can see my area where I pack and ship orders.

On this little table and then panning around that's my living room there. I have a bunch of storage in all these little containers. Over here that is my whole workspace, it is very small but I've found a way to make it very efficient for what I need to do.

I have one 2015 MacBook Pro that is just hooked up to an external monitor so that I can have two screens for working. I have a printer here that I used to print all my shipping labels. Then over here I have my little table where I put all the orders that are ready to go out.

Now that we're over here I can show you my shipping process.

  • 1. Step one is to take the shirt and put it on the scale, this one weighs four ounces so I put that in on my computer.
  • 2. Then I print the shipping label. They come out of my printer like this, two at a time. I always double-check who the order is going to.
  • 3. The next step is to print the packing slips. Once I have the packing slip printed, I make sure that it matches up with the address on the shipping label. 

These orders are through Etsy and one of the cool things they do is if a person orders gift wrap they give you a nice little sheet here that you can print, fold up and include. If their order has a gift message it's on here as well. This little orange murder paws shirt does not have gift wrap but this green shirt does. So I'm going to pack up the murder paws. 

  • 4. My top drawer has all of my shipping bags in various shapes and sizes depending on what I need for each order. Since this murder paws a small woman's tee. I'm going to pack it in the small woman's bag.  I'll use this bigger one for the order with the gift wrap.
  • 5. Alba is the person getting the murder paws shirt. I always put the label on the package before packing it. There we go, here is their packing slip. Usually, on Mondays, I have the most orders to ship and today is the Monday so I've got five orders. 
  • 6. Now for the fun one, I'm going to do some gift wrap. I keep the gift wrap in the fourth drawer. Let's do some pretty red; we don't need the scale anymore that one goes in the bottom drawer. I got this little drawer unit from Ikea and it's the perfect size and shape to house all my materials with a very small footprint. This one has a nice little gift message with it as well. So I take the shirt, put it in the middle, put the label on. Since I use a tissue paper, I always use two pieces so that it's thick enough that they don't see through. What would a little gift-wrap be without a ribbon? I have ribbon in this drawer too, this one's a sparkly blue. For space and efficiency, I have this little cart back here and I have magnet hooks that I keep on my scissors on so I have easy access to them. Then I put it right into the shipping bag. But I always put the label on first, they're gonna be so excited when they open it! 

You might be hearing a little bit of a low hum right now, my refrigerator has decided to turn on so that is part of working in the corner of my kitchen/dining room. But I really like having my office up here because I've got a window right there and I can look out into the backyard. That's pretty much why I have my office up here as opposed to having it down in the basement where I screen print. It gets pretty cold down there in the winter since it's only partially finished.

I really think that that's one of the keys to having an efficient workspace in a very small space is having little organized bins for everything. This is a three-tiered cart, I have all my pencils, bone folders, shipping supplies in here in the top as well as all my micron pens. When I'm drawing illustrations, everything just fits in this little cart and it is on wheels so if I need to take it to another area of my workspace it's really easy.

From start to finish that is my process for packing and shipping orders. I do this process every day I usually screen print once or twice a week. Normally my assistant helps me with that but I am doing all the printing, packing and shipping myself now so I am really glad that I have a very small setup that is efficiently organized for the quick output of orders. Sometimes they really can pile up, but with this system, I can easily ship five to ten orders in 20 minutes or so. Thanks for joining me today and if you enjoyed this video on my home office at how I pack and ship my orders.

For more cool projects, download my free DIY T-Shirt Hacks Ebook.

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