Building an Online Shop from Scratch in Fourteen Days or Less
Side Quest Summer · Quest #1
This post is where I am documenting the progress of the first of seven micro-businesses that I’m building in public as part of Side Quest Summer.
Read the backstory here! 🌟
Last updated: July 3, 2025
🎬 Quest #1: The Rundown
Quest Type: Micro-Business
Description: An online shop stocked with print-on-demand products (with my own original designs printed on them).
Store Name: Totebrag
Product: Tote Bags (and potentially leather clutches + zipper pouches)
Start Date: June 25, 2025
Target Grand Opening Date: July 8, 2025
Stack: Shopify, Printify, Photoshop, Illustrator
Cost to Launch: $18.55 and counting…
- Domain: $17.76 (annual fee)
- Shopify Plan: $0.79 (promo for first three months)
🚧 Daily Change Log
‣ Day #1: Choosing What Product to Sell
[June 25, 2025]
If I’ve learned anything from the first four e-comm shops I’ve launched, it’s that product choice is crucial. That may seem pretty obvious, but different types of products come with their own built-in downsides.
Note: I will be using Printify1 to source products and stock this shop. All designs printed will be my own original artwork.
Printify offers a lot of downright weird shit (chicken-wing shaped pillows, for one) as well as things that people would never buy — nobody needs a mousepad in the year of our lord, 2025. And it’s been an easy process of elimination for most of the remaining ideas that were originally on the shortlist.
Apparel: T-shirts, hoodies, tank tops, etc. immediately invoke sizing issues — offering XS-XL makes inventory 5x bigger (and 5x more tedious) right off the bat. Also people are super picky with clothes and often want returns.
Greeting Cards: Have you seen the greeting card aisle at Target lately? Millions. The market is saturated, so to stand out, I’d need a LOT of witty, cute, original2 designs. It'd be super time-intensive, plus each sale would only net a couple bucks, max.
Posters: I’m already selling posters/artwork in one of my other shops, Backstory Map Co., so I want to try something different.
Notebooks/Journals: I’m a stationerysnobaficionado, so this idea originally spoke to me, but the quality of notebooks/journals available from print-on-demand stores is honestly very mehhh. I’ve personally bought dozens of blank journals, but never once online (I like to touch and feel the cover/pages first) — so I’m nixing this idea too.
So that leaves us with two final ideas:
Candles: Besides the fact that trying to describe a scent over the internet is like trying to describe what a schnozzberry tastes like, this is actually a viable option. I briefly stocked candles in one of my former (now-closed) e-comm shops, and they were high quality and surprisingly decent sellers.
Tote Bags: Not the most original idea, but I think I can have fun with this. Plus, I personally use canvas tote bags all the time. And as far as e-comm logistics go: one size fits all, lightweight (cheap) to ship, could hit the [affordable retail price] vs. [profit margin] sweet spot. And I know from experience that the print quality + quality of the bag itself are solid (often a challenge with PoD products).
‣ Day #2: People Love Buying Dumb Shit
[June 26, 2025]
I mean that in the nicest way possible.
But it’s true: The dumber, funnier, and/or more unhinged an item is, the more likely someone will impulsively buy it, gift it, or share it (which worst case, is free marketing!)
Plus, when it comes to silly, borderline gag-gift products, people aren’t expecting luxury. Not because you’re selling junk — but because no one’s buying a ~$19 tote bag with a sarcastic saying and expecting Louis Vuitton craftsmanship. The vibe is more “this made me laugh, I need it” than “I demand a refund.” A customer base of sarcastic Gen Zer’s and meme-loving Millennials tend to roll with it.
I’ve done the “serious” e-comm product route before, so this time I want to try something more playful (borderline ridiculous). Hold on… maybe I should circle back to those chicken wing-shaped pillows from Day 1?! 🍗
Sarcastic candles or humorous tote bags themselves are not an original idea, so I want to make the products themselves original. So today I’m going to come up with a list of 100+ phrases or sayings that could be printed on each product.
That should help me choose which of the two product ideas to move forward with.
‣ Day #3: Day of BIG Decisions
[June 27, 2025]
This morning I officially decided on my product: Tote Bags 👜 ✅
Yesterday I even shared some rough draft mock-ups hoping to get some feedback, but tbh, the Substack algorithm doesn’t do instant gratification. Hopefully some will trickle in…
Fortunately, I also shopped the idea around to some friends and received rave reviews, so in the interest of time I’m going full speed ahead with minimal upfront validation of concept. Is this foreshadowing? Perhaps. But I’ve got 6 other projects up coming down the pike this summer, so I don’t expect everything to go perfectly this first go-around.
Anyway, here are some of the mock-ups:
I’ve also officially decided on a name: Totebrag ✨ 🎉
Choosing the name happened fast, here’s a note with the story behind what happened.
And thanks to some feedback, I’ve made my last big decision of the day: Here’s the logo I’ll be going with!
‣ Day #4: Less Brainstorming, More Bricklaying
[June 28, 2025]
Today I’m finally starting to build out the Totebrag.com storefront 🎉
I claimed the domain yesterday, but otherwise, I’m starting from SCRATCH scratch. In fact, looking at the totally empty, totally ugly Shopify site is pretty jarring… I’ve got my work cut out for me this weekend.
I guess I’ve never realized how much incremental work I’ve done over the years on Tidy Plans & Backstory Map Co. — little edits and improvements every couple of weeks adds up. My goal is just to get to an M.V.P. — Minimum Viable Storefront — before launch day (July 8th, just ten days away ⏳).
I’m using a new, more modern Shopify theme, so there’s going to a slight learning curve. But I’m excited to figure it out, because there will be a lot of built-in bells and whistles, and I probably won’t need to hack into the code as much, compared to my other stores.
Good thing I’m sort of hating my time in Singapore — so much so that I’ve decided to cut my losses, scrap most of my Saturday exploration plans, and camp out in a variety of bookstores and coffee shops all day to build. I haven’t really given this city a fair shot, but tbh, I’d rather be working on Totebrag — that’s a promising sign, no?
‣ Day #5: Letting Things Marinate
[June 29, 2025]
Today wasn’t very productive because it was a travel day. I left Singapore midday and didn’t arrive to my hotel in Bali until past 10pm — y’all weren’t JOKING about the traffic here, getting from the airport to Canggu took almost as long as the flight.
But I made it, and tbh, it was good timing to take a half-step back and let all of my ideas marinate for 24 hours before diving into actually building out the shop. A few ideas suddenly came to mind while WiFi-less/screen-less on my 2.5 hour flight.
More proof that constant consumption is the arch nemesis of creative output ⚡️🧠
I did have a few hours in the airport lounge and was able to make some progress on a new (regular) post. It still needs some final touches, but I’ll send it out in the new few days (and plan to continue sending regular essays throughout Side Quest Summer).
The title/topic of this essay: Start a Side Hustle, Change Your Life
‣ Day #6: A Fresh Starting Line
[June 30, 2025]
GOD it felt good to wake up and not be in that cursed hotel in Singapore, and it felt even better to wake up and be in Bali (the dog + rooster + moto alarm clock teleported me right back to Puerto).
As much as I was eager to immediately head to one of the ten million cute cafés here and get to work, I started off the day (and the trip) by joining a gym a block from where I’m staying. This is a bit off the Totebrag topic, but working out is always the first domino that knocks over everything else. Once I lace up my sneakers, everything else falls into place — I eat better, I'm more focused, and the rest of the day is full of momentum, not resistance 💪🏼👟
Anyway, I only ran 2km today (speaking of resistance, I guess my mental conversion to the metric system is finally underway because the treadmills here don’t do miles). But it felt great to start things off on the right foot. Now I’m deciding between joining a coworking space, or if I should just spent the monthly fee at those aforementioned ten million cute cafés instead, since Canggu is basically the only place on earth where I won’t feel laptop-in-public guilt.
‣ Day #7: Deep in the Shopify Trenches
[July 1, 2025]
Holy July, and holy first week of Project #1 already gone.
Right now I’m knee-deep in finalizing the product list (basically just the phrases that will go on the tote bags), loading them into the Printify↔Shopify integration, and building out the website home page.
I likely won’t have many exciting updates until this phase is over, but I’ll still add some of the interesting quirks and obstacles I’m running into in this stage. This part is a bit of a time-consuming grind, but I’m hoping to have this done in the next 48 hours! 🏗️👷🏼♀️
‣ Day #8:
[July 2, 2025]
When I opened the new storefront, I was in Singapore and I forgot to put my VPN on, so all of my Shopify charges were coming through in SGD. So I wasted a chunk of my morning on live chat support getting that sorted 🤡
It was actually giving me a slight rounding advantage on the currency conversion — and ironically, the price of the domain came out to $17.76 USD. But I had a feeling this would get messy down the line.
Normally I would have left this as a problem for future Emily, but look at me go, choosing inconvenience now over chaos later. Is this… self-growth? ✨🦋
‣ Day #9:
[July 3, 2025]
…
⏳ Pre-Launch To-Do List
Remaining on the to-do list:
Choose a product✅Come up with a concept/theme✅Come up with a shop name✅Buy the domain, claim social handles✅Design logo and branding✅Add new Shopify store to my account+ setup backend 🟡Finalize phrases for products + create artwork 🟡
Setup up Printify integration and load in all products 🟡
Customize Shopify storefront design 🟡
Add bells, whistles + boring compliance stuff
Place test order
Viola! Grand opening 🏁
🌟 Side Quest Directory
A constantly evolving directory of the micro-businesses and personal experiments I’m building in public as part of Side Quest Summer.
Printify is a third party print-on-demand partner that directly integrates with my Shopify storefront. Here’s how it works:
I upload an original design and position it on a product (say, a coffee mug, a t-shirt or a tote bag — this is what I’ll be deciding today).
Whenever a customer places an order, Printify prints my design onto that product.
(And this is the best part…) Printify then ships the product with my design on it directly to my customer. I never have to lift a finger.
Obviously, using a print-on-demand partner means lower margins (I’ll earn about 20-40% less per order) because they take a cut for doing the ‘manufacturing’ and shipping legwork. But to me, it’s still worth it because:
It’s a great way to launch a beta version of a brand/product line (if the shop catches on, I would likely take things in-house, end-to-end).
It’s really the only way that I can pull this whole thing off while I’m on the other side of the world.
My life goal is to one day create a greeting card line as cute and fun and amazing (and as large as) Bloomwolf Studio’s. That day is not today.
Oh my gosh, Emily. Send me the link and I’m gonna by stuff. I got some birthdays coming up!!!!