Love, Money, and Yarn Balls: the Rise of Etsy Husbands

Crystal Sloane is a pro at turning spun cotton into intricate, handmade figurines. There are seasonally themed ornaments like Santas and snowmen at Christmas, or radishes and turnips that can be personalized with the face of a loved one printed on them to celebrate spring. Crystal has been selling her work on Etsy since the dawn of the site 20 years ago. She got successful enough at dreaming up and making the quirky, vintage-inspired, custom items to quit her graphic design job in 2009 and pursue her artistic career full time. Two years later, and pregnant with her first child, she realized she needed to hire help.

Instead of finding someone to pack orders and send emails and paying them out of her then $75,000 earnings, Crystal looked to her husband, Ben. He wasn’t as happy with his job as a therapist at that point, and Crystal needed the help; so he quit to work for her — or, as they would debate and determine, with her. They started juggling the business baby and a new baby, but now, what was once Crystal’s handmade hobby business has been supporting their family for 14 years.

In a survey by Etsy in 2024, 83% of US sellers identified as women. Thirty percent of sellers said they did their work full time, rather than as an Etsy side hustle. More than half said that they sold their first goods on Etsy and that they started the business to make money while doing something they enjoy. The average Etsy seller said they spent just over half their time making and designing items, while the rest was eaten up by administrative work. Nearly 80% said they wanted to grow their businesses, but more than half said they didn’t want to have to hire someone else to help.

For some, there’s no need to put out an ad on Craigslist or Indeed. Enter: the husband helper. Move over, Instagram boyfriend — this is a promotion that involves more work behind the scenes than just finding the perfect photo angle. Some successful shops run by women are doing so well that they can turn into not just full-time jobs, but careers stable enough to support spouses and families, too. It’s a trend that also lives outside Etsy: More women are starting businesses, and more people want to work for themselves. These artists are living new twists on the family-run business, one that often involves a side-hustle turned career in crafting, an area dominated by women. Etsy has emerged as a place that, for those who hit it big, can bring life-changing money.

Working with a spouse isn’t all smooth sailing. At first, Crystal says, she had some trouble giving up her full autonomy over her shop, Vintage by Crystal, and Ben asked many detailed questions as she delegated. Over time, it became not just Crystal’s project, but a company fully run by the couple, and Ben’s name now appears alongside hers in the online shop. She still manages the artistic vision and works with her hands to make teeny tiny details for the ornaments, but he now manages the business side. “It was just a learning curve,” Ben tells me. That also meant managing expectations and the work style of his wife. “I was so used to doing everything and being in charge of everything and having it all done my way,” Crystal says. “We argued for a second about which kind of packing tape we should get, but then I was like, wait, that, that’s his business.”

Etsy couples are a niche of a larger trend: 2021 data from the Census Bureau’s Annual Business Survey indicated 10% of US businesses were owned and operated by spouses — and another 11% were jointly owned by couples but operated separately, with men more likely to be the main person operating the business, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. In 2023, McKinsey found that family-owned businesses generated higher profits (an average of $77 million between 2017 and 2022, compared with $66 million for other companies). Family-owned businesses that are less than 25 years old also grow twice as fast as other ownership structures, as founder entrepreneurial energy can lead to more aggressive growth that slows over time.

Those boundaries are hard: Am I your lover right now, or am I your boss?Kathy Marshack, psychologist and author of “Entrepreneurial Couples”

Kathy Marshack, a psychologist who’s the author of “Entrepreneurial Couples: Making It Work at Work and at Home,” says much research on family businesses largely focuses on the economics and business side, but less on the effects on the family. “There’s still a difference between romance and work partnership,” Marshack tells me. “I have plenty of those couples who come in and say: ‘What are we doing? Our marriage is falling apart, and our business is successful.’ And it’s because it gets hard; those boundaries are hard. Am I your lover right now, or am I your boss?”

But relationships and business partnerships do have threads in common: “One of the greatest preventers of burnout is feeling connected to your colleagues,” says Karen Bridbord, an organizational psychologist who specializes in executive coaching for company founders and is a certified therapist with The Gottman Institute. “I would argue that is important in a marriage as well.” When people feel that they’re carrying their weight and their spouse or coworkers are doing the same, satisfaction increases.

For some couples, spreadsheets and brainstorming are all part of the romance. Gabriela Baiter and Drew Downie saw a matched ambition in one another — for them, a romantic getaway was a weekend coming up with business ideas on the Oregon coast. In 2017, they found their big break in an eyesore in their small apartment: an ugly dog bed for their 13-year-old black Labrador, Gable. The two turned a cobbled-together prototype into a scaled-up business and now run Lay Lo Pets, designing stylish dog beds from Palm Springs. Baiter quit her marketing career to go full time for Lay Lo in 2023, and Downie followed, leaving behind his work as a creative director in 2024. “We had this moment and this realization of like, is this a hobby or is this a business?” Baiter says. Since they both started working on Lay Lo full time and launched a virtual dog training component, their gross revenue from the business has more than doubled, they tell me. Being in business together means the meeting day never really ends, but Baiter and Downie see that as a perk. “I could not imagine building a business any other way,” she tells me. Ideas come to them early in the morning, when they’re making pancakes for their kids, or when they’re on vacation in tiny hotel rooms (their pet company came to be over shared frustrations in their tiny apartment, after all).

The push behind Etsy is that anyone, even a novice crafter, can make it big. Sarah Cambio bought a used sewing machine off Facebook Marketplace in 2020 and taught herself to make doll and baby clothes. She figured she might sell some stuff on Etsy while taking care of her three kids full time, using the money for little expenses or as fun spending money. She tried out a few items, but her shop started to boom when she listed six fabric crowns for children that sold out immediately. Sarah called her husband, Brent, from the crafts chain Joann, unsure how much fabric to buy with the new interest. It was the turning point of a business that’s since ballooned.

Brent started helping her to set financial goals or find new ways to source materials, so they wouldn’t have to drive an hour from their Maryland home to buy what she needed. Brent, Sarah says, sees the big picture of the businesses, leaving her to handle the creative details, such as intricate embroidery, small pom-poms, and ribbons. “I tone him down, and he tries to hype me up a little bit,” Sarah says.

The shop, Flower Lane, made its first $100,000 in less than a year, the couple tells me. That rapid jump meant a shift in focusing on Sarah’s career after moving around for Brent’s — earlier in their marriage, Sarah took care of the kids primarily while Brent was in the Air Force, but her success on Etsy let her art become a focus for the family. “She didn’t really have time to really set down and establish a career,” Brent says. “I was just happy to see her get back into her artistic self, and it made her happy, so I was happy if she made $5 million or $5.”

On their first date, Adrian Krawiec told his now wife, Emily Phillippy, that he believed she would one day own her own jewelry store; he says he wanted to flatter her, but he also saw her dedication to her art, as she showed up an hour late, held up working in her studio. Over the next decade, she slowly went out on her own as a designer, and Krawiec pushed her to join Etsy, though she’s left the site since to focus on her store. Her business grew, and when Phillippy went to open her storefront for Emily Chelsea Jewelry in Philadelphia in 2021, Krawiec quit his job at corporate Ikea after 18 years with the company and started working for Phillippy — just as the two had their first child. They draw clear lines about the business; they avoid talking work at home, and it’s distinctly Phillippy’s. “Her name is on the building,” says Krawiec, who works as the senior director. “I’ve always looked at it like it’s hers, and largely speaking, my job description has always been to make her job as easy as possible.”

It’s easy to blur those boundaries accidentally, either by bringing work home or slipping out of boss mode. “Adrian helps the business so much in making it so much more profitable, so much more organized, and so he still is involved a lot in the decision-making, and I still will be like, ‘Should I do this?’ And he’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, you’re the owner.'” Krawiec plans to start working at the shop less and become more of an advisor, the couple tells me. It will mean more autonomy over the business again for Phillippy and a chance for Krawiec to explore other parts of his life. “I’m such an independent person, and we did it for four years, but that was not my vision,” Phillippy says of working closely together. Marriage vows are forever; business plans are not.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.