Rachel Jimenez: Etsy Printables Went $160K in 2021 to $77K in 2023 — The Shelf Life of "Build It Once"

The Etsy shop Rachel Jimenez runs from Southern California ships nothing at all. Christmas scavenger hunts, Elf on the Shelf games, digital planners — printables, delivered as PDFs the buyer prints at home. No inventory, no packing, no shipping.

According to CNBC’s reporting, the shop brought in roughly $160,000 in 2021. She started it in 2019 as a side project around the birth of her first child. The first sale took two weeks to arrive and was worth $5; her first month totaled $45. In June 2021, with sales strong, she quit her full-time job as a university administrator.

But what makes this case worth reading is what came next. 2022: over $110,000. 2023: $77,000. Less than half the peak, two years later. The story digital products usually get told with (build it once, collect forever) leaves a specific shape when you plot the actual figures, and hers is on the record.

Five years, laid out

Listing an item on Etsy costs $0.20, with the rest of the fees charged only on a sale. Printables fit that structure neatly: the design work sits within what Canva can do, the cost of goods is essentially the listing fee, and inventory risk is zero. In the GOBankingRates interview she explains her choice of category in exactly those terms. She already knew Canva.

What got it off the ground wasn’t the making

Asked about the jump from $45 in month one to $4,500 a month, she doesn’t talk about design. She talks about search. From the GOBankingRates interview: “Once I learned better marketing strategies and how to find niches that allowed me to show up in the organic search results on Etsy, I started to see my Etsy store sales grow substantially.”

Which is to say the business runs on Etsy SEO, not on design. Low production cost means low barriers, which means the product itself is hard to differentiate. The contest is decided in the step where you locate a theme with real search demand and thin supply, and the products that landed there (Christmas, Elf on the Shelf: categories where a season and a ritual manufacture the demand) are the ones that produced revenue.

That structure, marketplace ranking determines revenue, shows up again in Stoic Muse, selling philosophy-themed T-shirts on Etsy and in the minne handmade seller who built ¥550,000 a month around product photography. On a platform, being findable beats being good, in that order.

The other early lever she names is human. In the CNBC-syndicated piece she describes the Facebook group that came with her course as a place to ask narrow questions (how do I use social media, how do I figure out what keywords to use) and says that going it alone means “it’s just not going to be your best possible work.” Her time management was equally concrete: she moved her alarm from 7 a.m. to 6, spent 30 minutes of each lunch break working, and watched course videos in the gaps of childcare.

The person losing revenue explains why she’s losing it

On the slide from $160,000 in 2021 to $77,000 in 2023, CNBC reports that she has shifted her attention to other projects. Her 2023 Etsy workload was five to ten minutes a day answering messages. Read it the other way around: $77,000 is what remained after she stopped shipping new products and stopped maintaining her search positioning.

That is the useful part. Printables do not sell forever untended, but they also don’t collapse to zero the moment you stop. Two years hands-off, revenue down 52%. That decay curve is what “passive income” actually looks like. The stock of listings keeps turning over on momentum while its owner quietly withdraws from the competition for new traffic.

The shape of her income in 2023

Here is the breakdown CNBC published from her own accounting, all pre-tax.

• Printables on Etsy: $77,000
• Affiliate links on the blog: about $24,000
• Online course “Optimize Your Life Academy” ($297): about $12,250
• Adjunct teaching ($66/hour, three hours a week): about $10,450
• Newsletter advertising: over $1,500
• Online course “Passive Income 101” ($97, launched September 2023): about $900

The blog started in 2019, the newsletter in October 2021, and the list now runs past 8,000 subscribers. The two together take about four hours a week to write. A single-channel business became a five-channel one.

Note the $297 course landing at $12,250 for the year, roughly 40 to 41 sales. Eight thousand subscribers do not mechanically become course buyers. The same pattern appears in Arvid Kahl’s newsletter case: list size sets the ceiling on revenue but guarantees nothing about the floor.

What isn’t working

There is one channel she flatly says she hasn’t cracked. In the CNBC interview she calls Pinterest “a black box for me” and says she’s taking a course on using it to drive blog traffic. Printables and Pinterest are supposed to be a natural pairing, and yet the person who built a $160,000 shop still has it filed under unsolved.

The other risks are seasonality and dependence. When your best sellers are Christmas products, the year is back-loaded by construction. And the ground the shop stands on is Etsy’s search algorithm, which she cannot touch from her side. The shift of weight toward the blog and newsletter reads as an attempt to rebuild assets she controls, the same move visible in the family travel blog that took 13 years to reach $15,000 a month.

The record is worth more for its $77,000 than its $160,000

She opened in 2019 and grew in 2021. None of these sources say anything about how crowded the printables market has become since. Nothing guarantees the same products, sold the same way, produce the same numbers today, and the early figures cannot be separated from their timing.

What this case documents most concretely is not how the revenue was built but how it receded: 52% gone in two years of neglect. Knowing that number in advance changes how anyone would budget around a digital product. The value of three consecutive years of disclosed figures lies less in the $160,000 peak than in the $77,000 that came after it.