Today we’d like to introduce you to Katelyn Reisinger.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I had moved back home after college – right before the 2020 pandemic hit. My sibling and I were stuck home all day; and wanting a creative outlet and to encourage them to try something new, we ended up learning about digitizing patches and working an embroidery machine (neither of us had touched an embroidery machine before this). After some googling, watching some youtube videos, and making some prototypes, we were set to make samples and open an Etsy store.
Honestly I was hoping we would make maybe 1 or 2 sales, and it would be a good learning experience for my younger sibling before we called it quits. But then we kept making sales and….kept making more patches!
We got really good at it; and made the leap to even attend an in-person anime convention and have our own booth. Looking back, that was really ambitious – I think we only had maybe 10 designs back then? and our setup was really sloppy. But people really loved them! We sold out of some patches, and even made a profit at our first convention – which then set us up to attend at other conventions, local markets, and even oddities expos.
Eventually I made contact with a local seamstress who even got us some big gigs – Our work ended up on the Grammy red carpet on two separate artists, and we’ve even done work for Legoland and Enchant. Some smaller stores have even carried our products, and cosplayers are even tagging us on Instagram because they’re using our merch for their Cosplays.
Overall; it’s really exciting seeing our work reach so many people – and having that physical proof that a small business run by two siblings really can reach the big leagues in a lot of ways! We’ve had thousands of sales online and in person; and other people in the embroidery and patch making industry are asking us questions and learning from us too – the same way we learned from other embroidery artists when we first started!
It really all comes full circle, and we’re happy giving out advice to other small businesses and artist friends now.
We love doing collabs with other artists, and when we have the free time we love working to raise money for charities and other fundraisers.
I think the next path forward for us is probably having our embroidery work in movies or tv shows, and focusing on making even more clothing products. I want Cryptid Roots to be big – We’ve proven we have to talent to be that.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
The making patches portion was pretty smooth sailing – I think it was learning the business side of things that was always the most challenging.
Again, we just uploaded 3 designs on Etsy when we started – I was going to be happy if we made 1 or 2 sales, but I wasn’t holding my breath about it. Then the idea was we stop after the listing expires – I believe etsy listings expire after 3 or 4 months, something like that. So we didn’t have a business license or a separate banking account or any of the legal business paperwork because we weren’t there yet! We never imagined we would get there when we started. So as the sales started coming in I remember realizing and talking with our mom like ‘oh god, wait, do we need an LLC? How do we handle taxes like this? What’s an EIN number?’ So we were constantly playing catchup in the beginning in learning the business side as we grew – it was a huge learning curve!
I remember just having a folder of paperwork and a lot of anxiety and going to like, the Florida Tax offices because I needed help filling out paperwork and figuring things out. None of this was familiar to us – thankfully everyone was very helpful in the beginning and we always got the needed paperwork filed out, but in the beginning? Being that stressed about forms – and not even knowing what forms you need, or how to fill them out correctly, or worrying about filling them out wrong – It was stressful!
I had worked a lot of retail jobs, and I have even worked professionally as a seamstress for some years, but I had never run a business before. My sibling hadn’t had a job yet outside of this one, and no one else in my family really knew either – we all learned together. It was a nerve wracking experience; and really it was probably our mother that did the most heavy lifting there as far as researching things went – I would get so anxious about things, I just kinda froze up sometimes.
Now that it’s been a few years it’s obviously much easier and familiar now. I think now the biggest issue, like many things, is money. I want to expand and get bigger, reach more stores and customers and make more products, have more plastic-free packaging, do more charity events, do more collabs with artists, have our work in more places – but a lot of the things holding us back is simply money. It takes a lot of money to expand that quickly, for now we’re just working slowly and surely towards our goals, but that takes more time.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
We are a sibling team running an embroidery business, where we specialize mostly in patches. We do our own digitizing, run the machines in our home studio, cut and prepare each patch ourselves, package them – everything from start of concept to mailing it out is done by us.
Our work has been everywhere from the Grammy red carpet to the average kids’ backpack – I believe our ‘local witch’ patches have even made it onto the jackets of a female biker gang, which is cool.
We’re a made in U.S.A team – in a time where a lot of manufacturing is overseas and requires a high minimum to even make them; we’re just a sibling team making professional quality work for everyone – we’ve done one off custom patches for customers to making thousands of pieces for clients. I’ve had local clients reach out and ask ‘ hey, I’m so sorry, I want to place an order, but I need it tomorrow, can you do that?’ and we do – that kinda work you can’t expect when you’re dealing with large factories and waiting on shipping times. They wouldn’t even accept some of the smaller orders we’ve handled.
I’ve made patches for artists we’ve met at conventions or markets, and they haven’t even branched out into making real merch yet, they only have homemade stickers and prints; and suddenly they have these professionally packaged patches and merch and people buy them and they realize like ‘hey wait, this is an option for me, I can design stuff like this’ and they order more patches and make more designs and their customers love it. We love it – we’ve met some amazing artists this way.
But it really shows that the average person isn’t aware that we can have this professional level patch making service, at both the large and small scale, locally for people to access. That you can design something yourself and make it how you want it. Artists now are just very used to having to save up money and place a large order to some factory and cross their fingers and hope the merch turns out good – and it can really devastate their business if there’s a misprint, if the factory messed up, if the merch turns out bad, or is missing, or if they placed such a huge order but no one really buys it.
We don’t send out bad merch, We don’t need high minimums, – every patch, even in the thousands, goes through both of us. We know quality, and in the end we’re a small business of artists too – I’m not going to deliver something bad to another small artist; I don’t want to hurt my community that way.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
I feel like customer service is the make-or-break with your business once it gets started. There are other similar businesses that are the same size or bigger, with more options or cheaper alternatives – but they don’t have the same amount of five star ratings we do, they don’t have the repeat customers like we do.
We’re nice in our messages back to people when they have questions; we’re friendly and upbeat in-person at conventions, we try to be helpful when an issue comes up. And people remember that stuff – in a world saturated with options and competition, people keep reaching out to us, or coming back to order more from us, because they liked interacting with us, because we were kind.
I’ve had some customers who’ve sent me gifts back; or met us again at a different market and done trades and swapped items – because they were excited to see us again. They follow our social media and like our posts – even if it’s not something that they’re interested in exactly – because they want to support us.
On the one hand, we’re artists and this is building a strong following. On the other hand this is a business and it’s good networking. On another hand we’re content creators, and this is how you build a positive community.
There’s a lot of hands! and you can spin it a lot of different ways – but overall it’s just a term for the group of people that support your work, that want you to succeed, – and we’re thankful to those people and want to create that good environment with them – in every interaction, no matter how short or long it is.
Pricing:
- Our most common items are standard patches, and those cost about $10 on our website and in person
- But we also have mini-patches that are less than 2 dollars that are very popular; we’re working hard to meet the demand for them and make more designs!
- We have embroidered beanies that are $20, back patches that are around $40
- and you know I’ve even sold custom spooky quilts that are a couple hundred, so really we have items at all price points really.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/CryptidRootsLLC
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cryptidroots
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClRijtJx3Uf1SZldIbQvyhQ
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@cryptid_roots
Image Credits
Cryptid Roots LLC
