Chumi Studio: One Year
How it's going and where it's heading
About 12 months ago, I was on a call with a friend of a friend who had been running her business via Etsy for more than ten years.
“Just do it,” she told me.
“But I’m about to go home. What if orders come in during that time? I can’t really predict how much and which cards they will order, right?”
“The shop will need some time to ramp up anyways. You probably won’t receive any orders straight away.”
Shortly after the call, I simply opened the shop and started uploading my listings.
The next day, I had my first order from a close friend.
I smiled. Everything was so new and exciting. But in the back of my mind I wondered, “what if no stranger ever buys my cards? What if they don’t like it?”
And suddenly, I could hear my mother’s voice, “who nowadays buys greeting cards?!”
Two weeks later, I opened the Etsy seller app to check an order from a name I thought I recognised, only to find that I didn’t know the person at all.
A year later
A lot has happened since that first order from a stranger. I went from counting every single one of them to seeing my cards in store for the very first time. There were a lot of mishaps and periods of experimentation in between. But here we are:
So far, we have sold 700+ cards. About 200 of those were orders via Etsy from 14 different countries (🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨🇭🇮🇹🇳🇱🇦🇺🇺🇸🇬🇧🇫🇷🇨🇦🇮🇪🇧🇪🇫🇮🇸🇪), 500+ via Love Story of Berlin, and 20+ via amato. The numbers are still small. And if you’d asked me whether I am where I thought I’d be, the answer would be a definite no.
Beyond the numbers, it’s more than I could have imagined. Eight-year-old me loved to draw. But by 18, all the creativity that had filled my world with colours had been replaced by anxieties of choosing the “right” path. It took me more than ten years, and lots of career changes to find my way back to it. And even then, I didn’t quite trust it.
Before I designed my very first card, I called a friend, “I found the iPad I bought during the pandemic, but I’m not sure I still know how to draw.”
“Just get started, it will come,” she tried to reassure me.
“But I’m worried that I can’t make money with art,” I told her.
“Jing, you can make money with art. But you cannot think like an artist,” she said with a resolution that surprised me.
We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about business models and what is possible, and suddenly, the image of a starving artist that so often entered my mind, started to fade. And if I looked closely enough, I might even have seen him smile. It’s always a man, and one that looks nothing like me at all. I suspect that it’s simply my mind’s way of keeping the fear away from me, even though I still recognise it as my own.
In the end, it was the title of my podcast “You Rice Me Up” that inspired my very first card. A little dumpling on a bowl of rice, with the sun rising behind it. From there, my creativity simply flowed. I am still working on making drawing a consistent practice, but until then, you’ll find me either designing everything at once, or nothing at all.
The first wholesale order I can trace back to an email I sent about three weeks after I launched the Etsy store. I still laugh at my own audacity from time to time, but hey, it worked. Expanding my wholesale reach proved more difficult than expected, but the store keeps reordering, which means I have a market to work with.
The first half of 2026 was consumed by cashflow concerns, lots of networking, job applications, and reflections on how to proceed. For some time, I felt guilty for not building on the momentum that I had created last year. But it gave me clarity on my limitations and what to change.
What I’ve learnt
If I had to name the top three lessons, it’d probably be these:
1/ Distribution is key: launching a product is relatively straightforward these days. That is, if you’re not in a highly regulated industry like food or beauty. What’s much harder is to find effective ways to get your product in front of the right people. There’s no use in creating more products, if you can’t figure out a way to distribute them properly. It’s the key to making your business grow.
2/ Business is basically about repeated systems: looking at so many different business models, I started noticing a pattern. Successful ventures are not dramatically different from failing ones. Beyond the timing and resources available, it’s all about turning what works into repeatable systems that can sustain themselves.
3/ The biggest challenges are internal: especially as a solopreneur, whenever you hit a roadblock, it’s often related to an outdated belief you’re holding. For me, it’s mostly around professionalism, money, and art. Figuring out what you’re afraid of is only the first step. You need to continuously untangle your past from your future. Our nervous systems like to keep us comfortable, when what we really need is a balance of old and new.
Without the familiar structures of a regular job, there really is nowhere to hide. Starting and running a business is like having a mirror that shows you where exactly you need to improve. You need to constantly adapt, or risk falling behind.
But it also gives you something no other job can give you, which is a deep sense of self-trust. It’s like a gym for problem-solving. Because you deal with more uncertainty on the daily than anywhere else, you become so used to it and your ability to handle anything that comes your way.
What’s next
I’ve really enjoyed writing these updates for the past 12 months. But as I prepare to run Chumi Studio alongside an anchor job, I will switch from monthly reflections to a more thematic approach. What that will look like, you will find out soon.
And if you, too, are in the middle of figuring things out, just remember:
