Paige and Tim Schafer sell high-end home décor and other goods from their Beaverton home: here a handmade wood and resin serving tray for $119, there a “family makes this house a home” wall sign for $69.99. The couple has marshaled online retailers including their own website and Amazon to move product.
The internet tells stories of online sellers going full-time after investing various amounts of time. Going all in on virtual market stalls can seem like a get-rich-quick scheme, but these two whittled Schafer Art Studio into shape over several years — and they appear to have done well for themselves even amid the pandemic.
Paige Schafer started by learning to craft leather and making hand-sewn leather journals. Handmade at Amazon (since shortened to Amazon Handmade) launched in 2015. An administrative assistant at the time, Paige joined the new retail website, where everything sold had to be “made by hand” and “factory-free.”
Long interested in woodworking, Tim wanted to make something, too. They spent about half a year researching and creating a product before they launched his handmade signs business. Approaching 50 years old, Tim had commuted to downtown Portland for another sales job.
“Easy stuff started getting difficult, but the entire time I’m watching Paige, and she’s happy, she’s having a blast, she’s making gifts for people and totally enjoying the interaction and selling,” he says. “I was jealous.”
They started to make signs while he was still working. He calls the first two years, 2016 to 2018, “the danger years.” He says he worked 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and then 6 p.m. to midnight every day, then working weekends.
“I thought I was going to have a heart attack,” Tim says.
“He’d work all day and then come home and build signs all night,” Paige adds.
Tim got another job with a company that helped people sell products online, but he was laid off in early 2018. But he says he could not have been happier.
“I was the only person that didn’t have a misty eye that day,” he says.
That’s when the Schafers started hitting the online selling hard. They created more inventory to send to Amazon warehouses. Selling Amazon Prime products put rocket blasters on the business. Tim claims they went from doing around 1,000 signs annually to some 7,000 that year. He so badly wanted to make the business work.
“It was the golden ticket from the Willy Wonka factory for me,” Tim says.
“And it’s just so much fun to work together,” Paige observes.
Typically, the busy season for Schafer Art Studio runs from September through December. But last year was an oddball year for sales thanks to the pandemic. When the first shutdown occurred, about two weeks went by that were scary. Everything went quiet. People were home trying to gauge what was happening, Paige guesses.
Friends naysaid their business in the past, and the couple wondered if they weren’t right, according to Tim.
“Then April 1 hit, and it was like double Christmas,” Paige says. They didn’t get a break from April through Christmas 2020. Why? She reckons everybody went online shopping, and the studio found new customers who hadn’t done that before. “They’re at home, looking at their house and they’re like, ‘OK, let’s redecorate.’”
Across all platforms, Paige says the couple sells around $275,000 to $300,000 a year worth of products, and minus expenses like fees and cost of goods, they make more than $150,000 annually.
“We never dreamed eight years ago, that we'd be able to do something on our own and work together and build something,” she says. “It’s amazing.”
