DIY Things to Make and Sell from Home
Between the currently challenging economy and the job market, a growing number of creators are turning towards DIY (do it yourself) crafts to de-stress and earn extra income by selling online. Making and selling homemade products is a great way to showcase talent, creativity, and earn profits from the comfort of your home, and there are so many different DIY craft avenues to take, from gift baskets, home decor, scented candles, and lip balm to jewelry, paper crafts, tote bags, digital products, and wall art.
If you want to start your own DIY home business to sell crafts and generate extra revenue, we can help you unleash your creative potential and entrepreneurial spirit. Let's take a look at things you can make, ways you can make your items stand out, and where you can sell things online - from brick and mortar shops to craft fairs to online ecommerce outlets - to make extra money.
16 Things To Make And Sell
Candles
Handmade scented candles, especially soy candles, are an eco-friendly, sustainable, and customizable DIY craft idea, making them a perfect home decor item that's frequently seen at craft fairs and online marketplaces. Experiment with various molds, scents, and packaging options to attract different customers; even the container that you make your candle in (ceramic, metal, or a glass mason jar are some options) and the labeling can help set your product apart and make it stand out from other candles on the market. The typical melt-and-pour method of handmade candle making is fairly easy for beginners to learn (just make sure you label your products with the correct safety warnings, as your product does involve heat/fire.) And you can even create collections of candles with complementary scents, to encourage your shoppers to add them all to their home decor. Similar to candles are essential oil blends, an easy craft that adds pleasant scents to your customers' homes or offices without needing matches; customers might especially love customized blends that you could make to order.
Hand Crafted Jewelry
Handmade, hand crafted jewelry is an easy craft, and a timeless DIY product to make and sell. Jewelry trends, however, are ever-changing, so it’s best to do some research before you start making jewelry designs; follow some fashion influencers, read fashion magazines, and check out what’s currently popular in jewelry styles. For this craft idea, you can experiment with various jewelry-making techniques; include materials like beads, charms, crystals, and gemstones in your jewelry; and add in extras like chains and velvet jewelry bags. Bespoke, personalized jewelry items could also be a big seller, as personalized jewelry is always in demand.
Bath Products
A variety of bath products are fairly easy to make and sell, and can even packaged together to create higher priced offerings. Handmade soaps let your customers choose customized scents, shapes, and gifts for specific occasions; you can source natural ingredients to create unique scents and textures, including goat milk, honey, lavender, and calendula. Body scrubs and bath bombs are complementary products that can also be customized with scents and textures; consider adding ingredients like natural herbs, scents, and glitter to skew your bath products more toward high-end. Once you have these products made, you can combine them into bath kits, starting with your bath bombs or homemade soaps and then adding items like soap dispensers and fizzies to make a full luxury experience for your customers and make extra money for you.
Handmade Ceramics
Customers love handmade pottery pieces, home decor items that add a sense of rustic, homemade flair and are another frequently spotted product at local craft fairs. This DIY craft idea is also subject to trends, but a little less so; it’s more to your benefit to come up with unique designs so you stand out in what’s become a fairly busy hobby ceramics market. It’ll take a little effort to learn what you’re doing, especially if you’re creating earthenware, stoneware, or porcelain (which must be fired in a kiln), but some easy ways to get started include air clay or polymer clay (which don’t require a kiln) or even poured concrete for larger items. Alternately, you could skip the first step of creating the items, and purchase pre-made pottery pieces that you then customize with paints and glazes before they’re fired.
Stickers
Stickers are a popular and easy craft item to make and sell online for extra cash. People often enjoy decorating their laptops, tower computers, reusable water bottles, phones and notebooks with stickers, and you can supply a wide range of stickers that you design for them to choose from. Stickers can be created and sold in a couple of different ways; you can go directly to DIY paper crafting by designing your stickers in PhotoShop or Canva, and then printing them on a sticker printing machine like a Cricut, to mail out to your customers. For an even more pro level sticker with less work for you, you can have your sticker designs printed as digital products on-demand via a site like Fourthwall. On Fourthwall, you can host an entire store devoted to your stickers as digital products, eliminating printing and shipping costs and generating passive income for you. Once you decide on your design niche, you can create themed collections and customize your stickers to match customer preferences.
Homemade Cosmetics
If you're on top of beauty trends, making homemade cosmetics could be the perfect item for you to sell. Lip balms, for starters, are an ideal entry-level DIY product; similarly, you can create face and hand balms; face scrubs, toners, and serums; and body butters. Creating interesting blends with natural, organic, beautifully-scented ingredients will help differentiate you from your competitors. Packaging several products together (for instance, as a set of themed lip balms in tropical flavors) can increase purchases. and don't ignore the appeal of packaging, as an engaging set of brand labels, product names, and marketing could make your cosmetics even more popular to shoppers looking for more unique beauty finds.
Custom T-Shirts and Tote Bags
T-Shirts are classic DIY products to make and sell online! You can create your own designs, slogans, and patterns to attract your desired target market, which could be gamers, music fans, travel enthusiasts, sports fans, or fans of your own unique brand. Those same designs can be placed on other products as well, one of the other most popular ones being tote bags, which people use for everything from textbooks to groceries. Fourthwall offers a wide range of t-shirts and bags that you can customize and sell as print on demand products in your own dedicated Fourthwall store so you can eliminate printing and shipping costs and make extra money more easily.
Handcrafted Leather Goods
Are your DIY crafting skills of the leather-tooling variety? Handcrafted leather goods including items like leather journal covers, wallets, belts, handbags, personalized gifts, home decor items, and even customized horse tack items are all popular among leather craft fans. You can experiment with various forms of leather, textures, stitching, hardware, and tooling/designs to make your leather craft products unique. Another side gig of the leather craft idea is leather repair (IRL) - you could additionally offer your leatherworking person skills to fix leather items that have been torn or otherwise damaged.
Original Paintings or Drawings
If you're artistically inclined, original pieces of art like paintings and drawings are an ideal DIY product to make and sell online. You can offer various styles and mediums like pencil, acrylics, and watercolors to cater to how you like to work, and what types of art your customers enjoy purchasing for their own home decor. You can also sell them in several different ways, the most obvious being to just sell the original painting or drawing. You can also have your physical artworks photographed/scanned, so you can then repurpose them as digital product prints, thereby increasing your revenue, removing shipping costs, and creating a source of passive income. Your paintings and drawings could also be sold in yet another way, on products like t-shirts, mugs, or mousepads; the possibilities are only limited by how far you want to take your art.
Printable Wall Art
While original paintings and drawings are in their own art category, they're a one-time thing, which means you can only get revenue from each painted or drawn creation once. Printable wall art as a digital product is a popular DIY product to make and sell online, and allows you to sell prints of your art indefinitely for passive income well past the creation of the art. Printable art is affordable, easy to customize, eliminates shipping costs, and can be quickly downloaded by customers, and then either printed on their home printer, or brought to a local shop for larger-scale printing. If you prefer physical mediums, you can draw or paint your artwork, and then have it scanned into digital format for selling prints. Or you can create your artwork from scratch in a digital drawing or painting program like Photoshop or Canva, and export to easily printable formats and sizes.
Unique Paper Crafts
Similar to the printables above, you can also design and create various paper craft digital products like notebooks, calendars, planners, and greeting cards. There's an equally wide range of design niches and trends in this category, from wildflowers and Western motifs to modern art, illustrations, and Pantone trending colors. You can also add in personalization options for your customers like color choices and customized names. This category of paper craft DIY can be sold via two different methods, as you can have your paper products bulk printed and sell them individually (for instance, birthday cards or calendars) or in sets (boxes of assorted greeting cards or themed planner collections), or you can sell your paper crafts as digital printables, which results in ongoing passive income for you. Fourthwall is a great place to sell notebooks and other paper goods, including holiday wrapping paper you can have printed with your own custom designs.
Woodworking Items
If you have woodcarving or building skills, this craft idea has you crafting items made of wood. Wooden goods can encompass any era of trend, depending on what you research as in demand. You can sell items like coasters, handmade cutting boards and serving trays, rulers, wooden flags, custom signs, home decor items, and carved wooden wall art pieces are generally popular year-round; you could add in products like wooden carved Christmas trees or miniature sleds over the holiday season. Woodworking and built home goods can also be priced a little higher, as it's a time intensive skill that's worth more.
Plushies, Patches and More
Got sewing, knitting, or crocheting skills? There are plenty of options for you in this category of goods. Knitted, sewed, or crocheted plushies (stuffed toys) are a classic DIY product to make and sell. They're ideal for kids, but adults also love these unique and cuddly creations, especially if you create quirky, individual characters or recreate characters from pop culture, videogames, or other well-known fandoms (just be careful of copyright issues.) Similar imagery, along with logos, words, and designs, can be used on another sewn item - embroidered patches that can be sold and then sewn onto bags, backpacks or jackets. Alongside this category are other items that would be perfect for wintertime sales, like knitted/crocheted scarves, hats, socks and mittens.
Curated and Subscription Boxes
Curated subscription boxes or gift baskets are a unique DIY product that can take many forms, and that you can also personalize for any occasion. What kind of subscription box or basket you curate is up to you; researching what’s in demand will of course help you gain more sales. Some examples of curated gift basket contents might be food, coffees or teas, beauty products, home goods, or anime collectibles; you could sell these IRL (in real life) for pickup in your immediate area, or sell them via your online store. Expanding this idea into subscription boxes means you choose a niche (for instance, coffee), and then offer a six-month or one-year subscription where you send a box every month with a different hand-selected coffee in it. The products in the curated subscription boxes or gift baskets can simply be a variety of things you hand-select, or you can combine two of your business ventures by showcasing several of your own handmade items in each shipment, for instance candles, baked goods, and an herbal tea blend to make a “Sunday Chill” subscription box.
Homemade Foodie Gifts
Perfect for home chefs and those who enjoy experimenting with food, there are several categories of homemade foodie gifts that you can sell. Creating homemade spice blends can help your customers add an extra kick to their cooking; you can experiment with different seasoning combinations, from classic Italian herbs to smoky BBQ rubs. If you're skilled at making marinades and sauces, you can make batches of those and sell them in jars with your own custom labels; homemade garden salsas would also be a big hit. Other options that would be easy to make, package, and sell for some extra cash include candied nuts, baked goods, homemade jams and jellies, olive oil blends, and pickled items like olives or garlic.
Gourmet Coffee Blends
With coffee being one of the most consumed beverages in the world, creating gourmet coffee blends is an excellent DIY project to make and sell online. You can experiment with various coffee beans, roasts, and flavors to create unique blends, and package the bags of coffee in unique ways like burlap pouches or customized tins. If this idea appeals to you but you don't have the equipment or time to create your own coffee blends at home, you can always count on a company like Fourthwall to help you achieve this goal; Fourthwall lets you blend your own coffee and choose the packaging, easily shipping your new custom gourmet coffee blend to your fans and customers.
Where Can You Sell Your DIY Products?
As a DIY maker, you have the freedom to create customized products that cater to unique customer needs. But creating products is only half the battle. The other half involves finding potential buyers and channels to sell your products for that extra cash. Some of those transactions can be done IRL, while selling online offers a second excellent - and often much easier - opportunity to sell your DIY products, and also allows you to showcase your work to a much broader audience.
IRL Outlets
If you're willing to put the legwork in, there are plenty of IRL outlets where you can sell your handmade goods. At the high end, you could contract with an art gallery, home decor store, gift shop, or other brick and mortar location to sell your products either via outright purchase or on commission. This is probably the most prestigious way to sell crafts on the ground, and also gives you dedicated physical locations where your fans can find the things that you make. Other IRL opportunities can be found at local craft fairs, art shows, or farmers markets; but at the latter three, you'll also have to supply your own sales booth, signage, and displays. And getting galleries or stores to accept your goods is generally a challenge that will take a lot of time investment and effort, including shipping costs from your side; selling online is a much easier and potentially much more lucrative venture.
Online Stores
Opening an online store and selling online crafts is something you can do immediately, and gives you complete control of your products and brand. With an online store, you can create a unique shopping experience that customers can identify with. Fourthwall empowers you to launch a branded website where you can showcase your products, highlight your story, and cultivate a community around your brand. On Fourthwall, you can sell online using the built-in store builder with features like product listings, shopping cart functionality, and secure payment processing. Building an online store not only opens more opportunities for selling DIY products, but also allows you to feature your brand identity, sell crafts, and make a lasting impression on your target customer base.
Online Marketplace
Online marketplaces like Etsy are other popular options for selling items online, from fashion to bath bombs, home decor, gift baskets, handmade soaps, printables, and more. Etsy is ideal for makers who may not have a large customer base yet or are just starting out. The platform makes it easy to launch an Etsy shop and reach a larger audience, and also offers a secure payment processing mode. However, unlike establishing your own online store for selling items online, marketplaces like Etsy offer minimal brand control, low discoverability, and competition is usually high, as you're surrounded by many other people on Etsy attempting to promote similar products to yours, making it difficult to stand out.
Sell Your DIY Products With Fourthwall!
Fourthwall is a one-stop-shop solution for makers who want to make extra cash by selling online. By partnering with Fourthwall, you gain access to various features and tools designed explicitly for makers. You can launch a branded website, set up a print on demand product line, showcase your physical products from candles to home decor to jewelry, customize your web pages, and access useful analytics and insights to help grow your brand. With Fourthwall's built-in store builder, you can manage your product listings, track sales, and process secure payments.Digital downloads and print on demand are two of the easiest ways to sell things online, and Fourthwall offers plenty of support and customization options for both methods. But what you might not know is that you can also sell your own goods on Fourthwall - you can ship your items on your own from home; choose another fulfillment method by yourself; or Fourthwall can step in again to help with their own 3PL fulfillment service. If making things isn’t your thing, you can even let Fourthwall do the work for you! You can create unique, customized items like wall art, plushies, pillows, candles, and more, choosing the artwork/design and having the items created on-demand for your customers. With Fourthwall, you have lots of options!