Crafty Charlotte stopped trading hours for dollars.
Eight years on Etsy. Beautiful botanical illustrations, sold by the piece, priced by the hour. A MingleIn Workshop turned the skill she’d been selling one piece at a time into a recurring monthly Earnings line, without closing the Etsy shop.
$80 a piece, twelve hours of work.
Charlotte’s Etsy shop, “Letter and Leaf”, has been her main income since 2018. Botanical line-work pieces, hand-drawn, custom commissions. A typical $80 piece took 12 hours of work, $20 in materials, and another hour-ish in Etsy fees, packing, shipping. Net hourly: $4 to $5.
She’d thought about teaching. Friends and customers asked all the time. But Etsy is a piece-by-piece marketplace; there was no obvious way to add teaching without leaving the platform she’d built her audience on.
Another early Host introduced her.
An illustrator Charlotte had bought a custom piece from a year earlier had just joined MingleIn as an early Host. She DM’d Charlotte, said “this is the thing you’ve been describing for two years”, and shared the signup link.
Charlotte signed up on a Tuesday evening. The welcome email landed within the hour with the founder’s 5-minute intro video and free access to the Host onboarding Workshop. By Thursday she’d watched the onboarding Workshop end to end and had drafted her first Workshop topic: “Botanical line-work: your first three specimens.” The Workshop went live on 2026-04-17.
Three modules. Recorded on her phone. Live by week’s end.
The shape was the part that mattered. The onboarding Workshop’s Boast frame pushed her past structuring around technique and toward the question every MingleIn Workshop has to answer: what would a Member hold up at the end? Three botanical line-work pieces of their own choosing (a leaf from their garden, a flower from a vase on their kitchen bench, a seed pod from the local park).
That framing made the modules write themselves. Module 1: tools and warmup strokes. Module 2: your first leaf. Module 3: composition, your three pieces together.
The numbers, mid-April to end-May.
Charlotte’s Etsy shop is unchanged. The Workshop sits alongside it. About 20% of her Workshop Members have since commissioned a custom piece, which she sells through the Etsy shop. The Workshop is now a marketing channel for the rest of her practice.
The same shop, doing more.
Charlotte is recording her second Workshop (“Botanical wreaths and garlands”) and planning a third for the Christmas window. Her Etsy commissions have increased; the Workshops are bringing customers to the rest of her work. She’s stopped pricing pieces by the hour and started pricing them by what they’re worth.