Why Selling Too Many Products is Killing Your Margins!

We just spent three days with nearly 100 laser business owners at the K&G Jamboree, and after dozens of conversations, workshops, hot seats, and late night jammy jam talks, we noticed the same problems coming up over and over again. What is up? Welcome back. We know you love to do it, build it, and make it. And we're here to help you sell it. We just finished up the K&G Jamboree and it was a whirlwind, but we got to have a lot of conversations, we got to meet a lot of people, and we got to gather a lot of information. And our biggest surprise wasn't that most people had lasers or they didn't know how to use their lasers. The biggest surprise was really that they had issues with their product selection, their marketing, their confidence, their consistency, and their systems. So the top five problems we heard were, I don't know what products to sell. I underpriced everything. I'm trying to do too much. My branding looks inconsistent. I'm stuck in technician mode and not in entrepreneur mode. After hearing all of these things and having these conversations, we felt like these comments, feedback, questions that we had would resonate with most of our audience. So today we thought we would give some advice, a little feedback to answer some of these questions, and we'll use this feedback to guide the content that we'll produce for the rest of this year. Tip number one, stop selling 400 products. Don't be a bodega. Do you want to be that aisle in Walmart or in Target that's clearance aisle? No, you only go down there when you're looking to save a buck. What you want to be is you want to look more like the home decor aisle at Target. Don't be the corner store. You definitely want to curate your product selection, the things that you're selling at your booth or in your store. I know it's fun to make all the things, and you should have fun making all the things, but when you choose an event to go to to sell your products, whether it's your online store or at a craft show, you're going to want to curate that project product selection to something that's limited, and you just don't have one of everything or five of everything sitting across your booth. You want to make sure that the items that you're selling are kind of cohesive and go together and that are a limited selection, not all the things. Tip number two, pick a lane. This is kind of like don't be a bodega, but pick a niche because the riches are in the niches. Well, before you go into that, I wanted to share that I kept hearing a lot about, I would say, well, what products do you sell? And many folks said, well, I'm just getting started. I'm not really sure what it is that I want to sell. So we definitely heard the what's my niche story a lot. What a good niche is to find is your passion. Find something that you're passionate about. Don't try to fake your passion and try to do a product that you think will just make money. Tanner came to us when we first started doing this, and he's like, I'm going to make 3D door hangers, but for the pet niche, I'm going to go double down on the dogs. And I said, that is a great idea. There's a lot of money in the pet niche, especially dogs. What's your favorite dog? Like, I don't know. I go, what dog do you have? I don't have a dog. I go, well, you just lost a sale. So it's a lot easier to find a product and sell a product when you're passionate about that product. Right. Are you a classic car guy? We had a conversation once with a classic car guy, and he goes, I love classic cars. And Garrett said, find a way to sell a product that's in the classic car niche, because that's what you're passionate about. What things, what are your hobbies? How can you incorporate your hobby into your business? Now, you can't always run a full business on what you're passionate about. Garrett is very much passionate about BMX, and he would love to run a full craft business on a BMX niche. But I'm not sure BMXers buy a lot of door hangers. But he's also passionate about teaching. So our business supports his passion by being able to teach and showcase how to use Adobe Illustrator, showcase how we make some of these products. So it meets that passion that he has. Well, my passion is to make sure that you don't have to work for the man. That is, that is. He's very passionate about that. And I really enjoy the door hanger niche. I enjoy crafting. So we picked up our door hanger niche because of something that I like doing. But we can work in this business together because he's passionate about the teaching side of it. So if you're a couple like us, we see a lot of couples join us at the Jamboree and also on our Maker Place. So our Made It, Master It tier calls. We get a lot of couples. If you're doing a business together, find a lane that works for both of you. Something that a joint interest or passion that you guys can work together towards because that's going to make it feel less like work and more about doing something you love. Tip number four, pick products that can be personalized pronto. You want to find things that can be personalized quickly. Every purchase is an emotional purchase. Why'd you buy your car? Was it because it was rated number one in consumer reports or you thought it looked cool? Purchases are often an emotional purchase. So being able to personalize something with your family photo, a family name, is a great way to grab someone's attention and get them to buy right away. We just did a session at the Jamboree. If you have a personal UV printer, being able to take that printer to a craft show or an onsite event and being able to personalize your products right there. We showcase some software where you can upload your family photo or whatever your personalization is and purchase it right on the website and hit submit. It connects directly to a Google drive. You download the photo and hit print and then you can put your item right off to the side and have them pick it up in five minutes. So things like magnets, ornaments, those kinds of things, things that people will buy, especially if they're in that affordable price range, anywhere under that $20 price range, you're going to sell multiples of those because not only are you going to be able to sell to the person you had in mind, well, you can't buy just for one grandma. You got to buy for the other grandma or I might buy for my uncle or my aunt. So you're going to buy more than one. So that's a great way to be able to sell personalized items quickly. Tip number five, focus on repeatable products, not complicated masterpieces. Do you want to make art or do you want to make money? You want to make sure that you have systems in place to make your items repeatable and profitable. So we talk about door hangers a lot. We do our Test Cut Tuesday door hangers. If you're making one door hanger for a show, you should be making three to five of that same door hanger. If you can repeat that process and paint the hair five times at once and be able to put it all together at one time, you're going to have more products to sell and it's going to be more profitable because you made them more efficiently. So make sure whatever you're selling that you have repeatable processes and systems in place so you can make them again and again quickly, efficiently, and profitably. Tip number six, product photos matter more than people think. We just did a video on this showing you how to take your product and use AI and put it into multiple situations and give yourself some beautiful product photos. You can put it on a counter. You can put it on a door. You can add movement to it. So make sure you go back and watch that video. Christian also did some of that in his AI session, showing you how to use your AI in your business. But he's done in some of our master tier calls, AI on how to do product photos. And so, yeah, it's another one of those things where we're like, yeah, that's what people want to see. In addition to that, at the Jamboree, so some of these things were nice to hear people, like we were on the right track with some of the sessions that we had at the Jamboree. John and Crystal with Riley Black Studios shared a little bit about content creation and how you can use small setups, some little photo prop setups to make your photos look beautiful and give it special lighting and all kinds of things. So you want to make sure that those photos really showcase the product that you have because the nicer the photo, the more someone can see this in an environment that they want to be in, or they can see it in their home. Again, that's something else that's going to make them want to purchase that product. Well, seeing the item in its natural environment creates more of emotional experience. Yes. And Riley Black did a great job of showing you how to batch them out and take multiple videos and pictures on the spot to get weeks worth of content and pictures in minutes. Tip number seven, getting traffic to your Etsy store. Why are you on Etsy? Why would you want to drive traffic to your local mall? That makes no sense. Get your own website and then pack it full of your SEO, driving people to your website and to supercharge your SEO, create a bunch of backlinks. So when we post the video, I also make it a blog. I also put a product up there. I also make it a Facebook post and an Instagram post. And in each of those posts, I tie back to the video. I tie back to the product. Everything connects together, creating a giant spider web of backlinks that supercharge your SEO, driving your customers to your website, not the local mall. When all of the dust has finally settled from the jamboree, we got to sit down and ask ourselves, was it all worth it? Financially, no, it was not. But the community, the community is awesome and I don't think I could put a price tag on that. It was so energizing and exciting to talk to so many people, hear about their businesses, hear how excited they are about their businesses and growing their businesses and then just hear people talk about how much the jamboree meant to them. We heard story after story where people actually came to me. I said I wasn't going to do this, choking me up. Where letting me know that this meant more to them than I would know or a story about someone sharing that their husband came to this event. They came with a friend last year. They brought their husband this year. He's a super introvert. And he's not really into this kind of thing. But she was super surprised at how much he was networking and talking to people. And while she was telling the story, he actually walked by and said, and started talking to someone else. She's like, look at that. She even emailed back her, emailed home her daughter, sent a text to her daughter and let her know that, look at your dad right now, talking to all of these people. Yeah. And then just a little things like Mark Collier sent us an email after the jamboree letting us know that he's seen us. He says, I just wanted to tell you how much I recognize and appreciate all of the blood, sweat and tears you two have invested in your events. Well done. It's such a pleasure and honor to watch you do what you do from the outside. But I know from experience what it takes on the other side too. Yes, he does. So Mark and Will run the Next Level Maker event, which will be at in late August. So go check that out. But just him sending us that small little email after the fact that says you survived because that was exactly how we were feeling on that Monday after the jamboree. And some of the things that I shared back with him, I was like, yes, a lot of people were here at the event, but people don't always get to see the months of planning, the stress, the late nights, the problem solving, the worrying if people are having a good time and trying to make everyone feel welcome. Those are the things that people don't get to see that was stressing us out all leading up to and during the event. So while we had a great time, you want to make sure everyone else is having a great time too. Everyone is having a good time. Well, I'm about out of time. We have to get back to normal life. You have to get back to normal life. What is up? Welcome back to Jamboree 2026. I've had the best time at the jamboree. Didn't know what to expect. Found lots of nice things I'm going to buy. I've already got a cart full of stuff ready to hit send, but great time. This is my second time here. I had so much fun the first time. I had to come a second time. I make new friends every time and it's been wonderful. I learned something new every time. Amazing. This time has been, I never imagined that I was going to have so much fun. Here is my first time. It's my first time at the jamboree. And it's been unbelievable. Amazing. Hey, it was amazing. More than I expected, man. I had a blast. Learned a lot. Hey, I can't wait till year after next. Can't go on the cruise. Year after next, I'll be back. It's been great. I'm excited for the experience. If you know, you know. The AI portion of it, I thought I knew AI. Yeah, no, I really don't. This community is very supportive and everything that I learned, all the classes, all the mentors, all the teachers, and the sponsors, everybody. And Kim and Garrett always with the fun vibe. I suck at making bows. So that was actually helpful to go to Bowtown. It was amazing. It was way better than I thought it would be. Everything went way better than I thought it would. Right? It's one of those things that you put all this time and effort and practice into. And then guess what? It actually worked out just as you planned. So I mean, the people were great. The sponsors were great. The counselors were amazing. I think that just the whole thing seemed to have gone off without a hitch. Everyone seems like they had a great time. I feel like they learned something. And it was super casual. And that's what makes it so fun. It's all about networking and just chatting with your friends and learning something new and meeting new people. Meeting new people. What an awesome time. If you've never attended a Kim and Garrett Jamboree, you don't know what you're missing. I can't wait to do this again next year. But this time it'll be on a boat.