I opened the shop in 2013 with nine Blogger templates, a clunky payment button, and a lot of hope. The whole thing fit on one kitchen table. Six templates were pink. I sold my first copy to a woman in Portugal within a week and celebrated with the good chocolate.
Thirteen years later I still sell templates, from the same kind of table, with a much better desk lamp. When people ask what I’d change if I started over, the honest answer is quite a lot. This post is the letter I’d send to the designer I was at 26.
I’d price the templates properly from day one
My first themes were 9 euro. I thought cheap meant kind. What cheap actually meant was that I needed to sell sixty copies a month to pay for groceries, and sixty copies a month meant constant launches, constant marketing, and constant design work at speed.
A good theme saves a blogger weekends of fiddling. Mine now cost 49 to 79 euro and people thank me for the price. Undercharging didn’t bring me more grateful customers either; the cheapest buyers were the loudest in my inbox, historically speaking.
If I launched today, I’d research what established theme shops charge and price within a few percent of them from day one. I’d also charge for updates properly. For two years I rebuilt every old template by hand for free each time WordPress moved the goalposts, which brings me to my next point.
I’d write the documentation before the launch
A template shop turns out to be a support business with a design habit attached. In my first year I answered the same eleven questions hundreds of times. How do I change the header. How do I add my photo. Why did my sidebar jump to the bottom. Where did my fonts go.
Each email took ten minutes. Forty emails a week is a full working day spent typing, and it’s the day I wasn’t designing.
Now every theme ships with a written guide: setup in order, a screenshot per step, a page of common fixes, and a short video for the fiddly parts. Support volume dropped by more than half the month I started shipping guides. If I launched today, the documentation would be written before the first product went live. I’d treat it as part of the design.
I’d carry fewer designs and finish them harder
At one point the shop had 34 products. Thirty-four. Variations of variations, a couple of seasonal layouts, three templates that existed because one customer asked for them and then she never bought one. Catalog sprawl is the slow death of a small shop, because every extra product needs updates, screenshots, support answers, and a place in the menu.
The best sales quarter I ever had came the year I retired eleven products and rebuilt the remaining ones properly. Fewer choices made the shop look more confident, and confidence sells design. Today’s version of me would launch with five themes, each of which I’d actually use on my own blog.
Marketplaces or my own shop? Both, in that order
For about three years I sold only on my own site. Then I listed two themes on a big marketplace and made more in a month than I usually made in a quarter. The audience was already there, already browsing with a card in hand. My commission was real, but so was the volume.
What I’d do today is exactly what I ended up doing anyway, except sooner. Launch the newest work on a marketplace where buyers already gather, keep the back catalog and the custom work on my own shop, and let the two feed each other. The marketplace sends strangers. The shop is where strangers become regulars, and regulars are the ones who buy the 2,000 euro custom packages.
The one caution I’d shout at my younger self: read the marketplace terms twice. Exclusivity clauses, commission tiers, and update obligations are where the margins live.
I’d also keep one design exclusive to my own shop at all times. When a marketplace shows buyers everything I make, my own site needs to hold something they can only get by knocking on my door.
I’d build the email list on the first day
For four years my only marketing was a blog sidebar and hope. The launch that changed things was the first one I sent to an email list. It was 400 people. It sold better than the launch before it that went to 20,000 Pinterest viewers.
A list is the only audience a small shop owns. Pinterest can change the algorithm. A marketplace can change the commission. My newsletter is just mine. I’d put the signup box in the very first template I sold and offer the next theme free to anyone who runs a small blog, because that’s the audience I want anyway.
What actually changed since 2013
The world my first templates lived in is gone in a few specific ways.
Phones took over, which pushed me into responsive web design properly. In 2013 I designed for laptops and apologized to phone readers. Now I design for phones first and the desktop is the special case. WordPress also changed under my feet: the block editor arrived and suddenly every theme needed to work with blocks, patterns, and site editing instead of a fixed set of page templates.
Buyers changed too. A hobby blogger in 2013 wanted a pretty sidebar and a custom favicon. Today she wants a shop, a newsletter, a link-in-bio page, and page speed scores that don’t make her cry. She also finds me through search or an Instagram share instead of a blogroll, so every product page has to read well to someone who has never heard my name.
What hasn’t changed: people buy a template because they can already see their own words living inside it. The screenshot that sells is the one with real content in it.
I’d run it like a studio from the start
For the first two years I had no contract, no invoice numbering, and a shoebox of receipts. My first custom client paid me four months late because I’d never actually told her when payment was due. Embarrassing, and entirely my doing.
Today every custom project starts with a signed brief, a deposit invoice, and payment terms written in plain language on the invoice itself. The boring paperwork is what lets me be cheerful about the creative part. (The fees on card payments come out of my rates as a matter of course, so they never become a conversation mid-project.)
I’d protect the calendar and the hands
In 2016 I worked eleven weeks without a day off, wrapped around launch deadlines I’d set for myself and could have moved. My wrist hurt for a month afterwards. That was the year I learned that a small shop has exactly one asset that cannot be replaced, and it sits at the end of my arms.
Now the studio runs on four-day weeks and two launch seasons a year. Everything still gets done. It just gets done without the 2am panic I used to treat as proof I cared.
What I’d keep exactly as it was
Plenty of it. The hand-written thank-you notes in every package download, the free templates for students, the Friday afternoons I spend making mood boards with no commercial purpose at all. The kitchen-table energy of the first year, which I’ve worked to keep even though the table got bigger.
If you’re standing where I stood in 2013, the short version is this: price like the work matters, write the guide before you launch, keep the shelf small, collect email addresses from day one, and get the money terms in writing. Do those five things and the rest of it, the fonts and the palettes and the pretty, is the easy part. It’s also the part that made me open that shop in the first place, and I’d do it all again. Just with better prices.