I thought I’d take some time today and answer some of our most frequently asked questions.
Q. How long have you been in business?
A. K and R Styles has been in business since 2019. I had a bad episode that sent me to the hospital, and while in there, I came up with the idea and on October 25th, I put it into motion.
Q. What does the K and the R stand for?
A. Those are my grandchildren’s initials. The first ones to make me a grandmother. I now have 7 grandchildren in total.
Q. Why don’t you sell on Etsy anymore?
A. There are several reasons. The first is that you have to be careful in how you list things because of trademark and copyright infringements. The second is because I had too many strikes thinking that just because I handmade something, it was okay. It’s not. I actually had a viral video about it. But it is okay. I learned some things, and now I don’t have to pay Etsy’s exorbitant fees. At the end of the month, even if I sold 20 items, I owed Etsy. I couldn’t see passing those costs on to my customers just to make a profit. I would’ve had to increase my prices to 3x the amount just to see fifty cents of what I sold. It wasn’t worth it to sell you a $5.99 bib for $18 just so that I could make $1. Now I can make my $1, but your cost is a lot lower.
Q. Where do you get your patterns and designs?
A. I source those all over the internet. Plus, I also design my own. I’m good at being able to look at something and figure out how to create it based on garment construction. My grandmother taught me to sew without a pattern when I was 9. I don’t think that she read patterns. She just sewed.