36-year-old’s Etsy side hustle brings in $220,000 a year—and costs under $40 to start: ‘You really can make a very good living’
This story is part of CNBC Make It's Six-Figure Side Hustle series, where people with lucrative side hustles break down the routines and habits they've used to make money on top of their full-time jobs. Got a story to tell? Let us know! Email us at AskMakeIt@cnbc.com.
She was in the lobby of a gymnasium at a kid's birthday party near her home in Melbourne, Florida. One of her daughters had just taken a bite of Publix birthday cake, when her phone pinged: She'd sold a $22 T-shirt with a speech pathology-themed design on e-commerce marketplace Etsy.
"I can vividly see the cake, the balloons and remember thinking, 'This can work,'" Odio-Sutton, 36, tells CNBC Make It.
Odio-Sutton started looking for a side hustle in 2022, after realizing her 9-to-5 job as an internal operations manager at a teachers' book publishing company would prevent her from picking her daughter up from kindergarten. She started a print-on-demand shop, using Canva software to create designs for Etsy-friendly products like T-shirts and candles. Whenever a customer places an order, a manufacturer called Printify prints the design onto the product and ships it out for her.
Her Etsy store brought in $220,300 last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Odio-Sutton estimates that 30% of those sales are profit. She's used her side hustle earnings to pay off her entire $20,000 student loan balance, start investing in the stock market, open college saving accounts for her daughters and take a cruise with her husband, she says.
