How One Maker Quadrupled Her Teacher's Salary Selling $12 Sewing Patterns (And Why Narrowing Her Focus Made All the Difference)

What if the key to scaling your store's sales isn't working more hours? What if it's just selling smarter?

Meet Amanda Whisman. She's the maker behind Be Mandy Things, and she's done exactly that. She grew her sales month over month, in the middle of a full time teaching job and raising two kids, until she had enough proof to finally walk away from that job for good.

I sat down with Amanda on the podcast to talk about how she did it, and I am telling you, any maker can use the exact same strategies she used. So let's get into her story.

From Sewing Lessons in Her Kitchen to an Etsy Shop That Sold Out in 12 Hours

Back in 2016, Amanda was a stay at home mom with one son heading off to kindergarten and a younger one still at home. She was looking for something for herself, something outside of laundry, cooking, and childcare. Her mother in law happens to be a seamstress and quilter of decades, so Amanda asked for a couple of sewing lessons.

Her first day at the machine, she hit the pedal like a NASCAR driver. Her mother in law had to slow her down and give her homework: practice sewing slowly. Amanda practiced. She moved on to pillowcases, then home decor projects like quilted table runners and mini quilts. Eventually she found bags, and that's where things really took off.

When the pandemic hit, Amanda had time on her hands and watched every YouTube tutorial she could find on sewing bags. She started giving some away as gifts, and people kept telling her, "You should open an Etsy shop." So in June of 2020, she did. She had her first sale within 12 hours.

That hooked her. She kept sewing, got active in the sewing social media community, and became a brand ambassador for a few fabric companies, starting with Maywood Studio. That's actually how she wrote her first sewing pattern, a quilt block for a sampler project. She originally offered it free just to build her email list. The following year she joined Benartex Fabrics and turned that same quilt block into a bag pattern. From there, it snowballed. Today Amanda has around 18 sewing patterns available on her site. 

The Pivot: Choosing Patterns Over Products

Amanda ran her handmade bag business and her Etsy shop side by side for years. She didn't launch her own website until around 2023, and that was mostly because of changes happening at Etsy, higher fees, management shifts, and a lot of sellers looking to get off the platform. 

She built her Shopify site so she wouldn't be dependent on Etsy alone. She still keeps her Etsy shop active for pattern sales today, but the majority of her business now runs through Shopify, where she owns the customer relationship directly.

Somewhere between 2024 and 2025, Amanda made a bigger (and scarier) decision. She deactivated her handmade bag listings almost entirely and put her full focus on selling patterns. The handmade items are technically still on her website, buried deep enough that you have to search for them. 

Here's what led to that decision. Amanda wasn't making sales on the handmade items, on Etsy or her own site, but her patterns were taking off. When I asked if she thought her bag customers and her pattern customers were even the same audience, she said no. Her patterns are built for beginners, quilters and hobby sewists who want to expand their skills but are intimidated by the idea of sewing a bag. There's a myth out there that you need an industrial sewing machine to make a bag. Amanda built her whole messaging around busting that myth. You do not need one. Her patterns are designed to help you get a professionally finished result on the machine you already have at home.

What's incredible is that Amanda's background has nothing to do with sewing as a profession. She spent over 25 years in education, with a degree in elementary education, and describes herself as knowing "nothing about business." But that teaching background is exactly why her patterns work so well. She knows how to break down a process so a total beginner can follow it and succeed.

What Actually Moved the Needle in the Inner Circle

Amanda joined our Inner Circle last August, after our Facebook ad kept showing up in her feed. She told her husband, "I've got all these numbers and I don't know what to do with them." She had a healthy social following and email list already, she just didn't know how to turn them into consistent revenue.

Once she was in, she started working through the classroom trainings and listening to the podcast. Two shifts made the biggest difference in her sales.

The first was bundling. Amanda had a bestselling beginner bag maker guide, her hero product, and after hearing a podcast episode about increasing average order value through bundles, she paired that guide with each of her individual bag patterns. That way, a customer who needed extra support could grab the pattern and the guide together in one purchase. She started doing the same thing with her other sewing patterns, pairing them into bundles so a beginner could see something like "Beginner Bag Making Bundle" and know immediately that's what they wanted, without having to think or compare. The result wasn't necessarily more orders. It was more product in each order. That's low hanging fruit, and it worked.

The second shift was her email strategy. Before joining the Inner Circle, Amanda was sending emails, but she was borrowing ideas from other newsletters in the sewing industry, trying things because they sounded fun, and getting frustrated when they didn't convert. She was also cramming everything she wanted to say into one long email because she was afraid of bugging her list or getting unsubscribes.

She scaled that back. 

Now she focuses each email on one thing, with one clear call to action, sent consistently. She sends two mini campaigns a week. If someone unsubscribes, that's fine. They weren't her people, and new people are coming in every day.

The Black Friday That Changed Everything

Amanda had run Black Friday sales before joining the Inner Circle. She made about $200. Not exactly life changing.

Last November, with her email list somewhere between eight and ten thousand people, she went through our Black Friday training and applied it fully, not partially. The training pushed her to focus on one single thing and get it out there, rather than spreading her offer thin across a dozen ideas. She used the templates for her emails, created her own images for social and email, and put everything she had into the execution.

The result: she tripled, almost quadrupled, her monthly income as a teacher, in that one month, from Black Friday alone.

That same instinct is what made her December so strong too, even though patterns aren't an obvious holiday gift item. Amanda built a full holiday catalog in Canva, using AI to create festive product photos, and marketed the patterns as gifts people could make for someone they love. She leaned into the feeling of watching someone open a handmade gift and light up, knowing you made it yourself. That emotional angle, not a discount, is what sold it.

She's applied the same bundling instinct again recently with a Summer Loving Bundle, three of her patterns perfect for summer travel and day outings, packaged together with a small discount and its own set of styled photos.

Tracking Numbers, Not Feelings

One of the things I love most about Amanda's story is how she uses data. After completing our Reliable Revenue program, she now tracks her numbers weekly. That means she's not just guessing whether things are going well, she can see it. If she notices a decline in new customers one week, she knows exactly where to put her energy next, whether that's growing her list or her social audience. She's making decisions based on facts, not feelings, which is something I talk about all the time because it is genuinely hard for most of us to do consistently.

Her biggest sources of both traffic and sales are her Klaviyo email campaigns and Facebook, in that order. She has never run a paid ad. Everything has come from organic social media and email, built consistently over time.

Her numbers today: over 57,000 Facebook followers, a Facebook group with more than 7,000 members, and a YouTube channel with tutorials that has crossed 4,500 subscribers. She posts reels Monday through Friday and takes weekends off. When she's low on creative energy, she'll repurpose an older reel that performed well, changing the hook or caption rather than starting from scratch. Done is better than perfect.

She also gave up on giveaways entirely, they never worked for her. What does work now is a pair of low pressure freebies: a Beginner Guide to Interfacing (interfacing being, in her words, "every bag maker's nemesis") and a one page cheat sheet of tips she uses while sewing. Both are offered in exchange for an email signup, and because they solve a real, specific problem, they attract exactly the right people onto her list.

Interestingly, she moved away from giving away a full free pattern, because it started attracting people who expected everything for free and got frustrated the moment they had to pay for anything. Her current freebies are useful enough to build trust, without delaying that first sale.

Making the Leap

Amanda came into the Inner Circle in November already posting about how her sales were climbing month over month. That was also the month she decided to leave teaching for good.

It wasn't an easy call. 

She was doubling, sometimes tripling, her teaching income on the side while working a demanding, draining full time teaching job and raising two kids. That was her proof. If she could hit those numbers with almost nothing left in the tank at the end of the day, what would happen if she gave the business her full focus?

She didn't have savings specifically set aside for the leap. She just had the extra income she'd been generating in the months prior, and she jumped. In four and a half months since walking away from teaching, she has already surpassed her entire former annual teaching salary.

Life is different now. She's more relaxed, she's started teaching bag making classes at a local quilt shop, and she has the flexibility to leave in the middle of the day if one of her kids needs her, something that simply wasn't possible before. She told me about standing in the pickup line at her son's school after a small fire at the building, watching sales notifications roll in on her phone while she waited. That's the kind of freedom this work has given her.

What's Next

Amanda's next big move is turning her digital patterns into paper patterns. She noticed other pattern designers selling paper versions at quilt shows, and her local quilt shop has already asked to carry her patterns in store. There's a whole customer base out there who simply prefer paper over digital, and she wants to reach them through wholesale and in person events.

The Real Lesson 

If you sell digital, low dollar products, patterns, printables, templates, whatever your version is, Amanda's story is proof of what's possible when you stop spreading yourself across every strategy you hear about and instead commit to a few things done well. Bundle your products so people don't have to think about what to buy. Send fewer, more focused emails. Track your numbers every week so you know where to put your energy next. And give yourself permission to narrow your focus, even if it means walking away from a part of your business that isn't working.

You already have more control over your results than you think you do.

If you want the exact trainings Amanda used to build this out, from bundling to Black Friday to weekly number tracking, that's exactly what we work on inside the Inner Circle. You can find Amanda at bemandythings.com, and if her story sounds like the nudge you needed, I would love to see you inside the Inner Circle too.

RELATED LINKS:

See Amanda’s store here: https://bemandythings.com

Amanda’s lead gen strategy: https://www.linkdm.com/ 

How Sarah Built a Full-Time Income Selling Her Art Online (Without Ads) https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/how-sarah-built-a-full-time-income-selling-her-art-online-without-ads-episode-313

Here’s How A Maker Gets Set Up For Consistent Sales https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/heres-how-a-maker-gets-set-up-for-consistent-sales-episode-304

Handmade Business? See How Janine Will Double Her Online Sales https://www.thesocialsalesgirls.com/blog/handmade-business-see-how-janine-will-double-her-online-sales-episode-300