What you probably don’t know about me.
Just by looking at my LinkedIn, you will see I am a UX Designer. You’re probably already connected with me there, so you looked at my profile at one point and probably even talked to me in person or online.
But what you don’t know about me (or very few know) — I am a small business owner. Actually, I only own my business online. I sell vinyl records.
I’ve been selling records for about 4.5 years now at this point. It all began in 2017 when I decided to sell a few of my records to buy another record that I really wanted. I named my online store Vinylery because I decided to play on the word “Winery” and thought “Vinylery” sounds pretty cool. You come to my store for vinyl records. Simple. I decided to use a website called Discogs to sell my records. It’s a huge global marketplace that allows you to catalog your music, as well as sell and buy them. That year I made around 20 orders in about 5 months. In 2018 I received 50 orders. Then in 2019, I had around 100 orders. The year 2020 was looking promising. Within the first 3 months, I had 100 orders.
But then, Covid-19 happened and everything was shutting down and sales went extinct. I stopped selling my records in April. I wasn’t in the mood trying to sell my records too. The whole world was in shock and nobody knew what's going to happen next.
Then in July of 2020, I decided to open up my online store again. From July 2020 till the end of November I had 230 more orders of records. I keep saying orders because about 20% of my sales actually consist of multiple records. So I basically hit 500 sales overall from mid-2017 to November of 2020. That was a huge accomplishment for me. I felt pretty proud of myself, not going to lie.
As you can see my inventory is pretty big and most of my records are used and pretty cheap. I would say about 60% of them are around 1–5 bucks. The rest are new records and used records that are in pretty good shape and somewhat hard to find. After these huge sales in 2020, I was feeling pretty good for 2021. In December 2020, I had about 70 more sales.
January 2021 was … slow. I literally only had around 20 sales. I had no idea what is happening. Still don’t know what happened.
Then February came around and boom … my sales went up again.
I took this picture on January 1, 2022.
From January 2021 to January 2022 I got 730 orders. In 2020 I got around 400 orders. I basically almost doubled my sales. As of January 1, 2022, I got 1300 sales since 2017. Sorry for all these numbers, but it makes me proud that my sales keep growing and growing.
As of January 10, I already received 40 orders. 10 days, 40 orders. Crazy. I hope to double my record sales from 730 in 2021 to hopefully 1400–1500 this year.
Anyway, here is my little breakdown of what I do in my spare time as my little side business. It’s never too late to start your own business. You don’t need much of money to start and very little space with something like vinyl records.
Want to see what I am currently selling and support a small online business — check out my online store Vinylery here.
