Making and selling thousands of crochet keyrings

Working from home, by myself, my day can often get very repetitive. It sometimes feels like I'm stuck in a time loop, doing the same things over and over. Since I'm self employed, to an extent I can choose what I do day to day, so when I feel like I'm doing the same routine, I find it quite frustrating because I could mix things up if I wanted to.

If you follow me on Instagram, you'll know I sometimes set myself outrageous challenges. In the past I've challenged myself to make 100 zipper pouches in a day. Another time, I made over 100 reusable wipes in a day. Technically, these challenges feed into the feeling of repetitiveness that I mentioned can be quite frustrating, but it does so in a way that breaks up my day to day routine, as I wouldn't normally make so many of one product in a day. It also feels good to be able to set a goal that seems unobtainable and to then achieve that goal.

Previously, the business-related challenges I've set myself have been short term challenges, designed to last a handful of days at most. But I've decided to up the challenge and set something more long-term to achieve. That being said, the aim will always be to complete the challenge as quickly as possible, whenever that might be.

I'm going to make and sell 2500 crochet keyrings

For the sake of being able to make the numbers work as easily as possible, I'm going to assume that each keyring will take thirty minutes. Some of my keyrings take a lot less time to make, while others take a lot longer, so this should average out to be fairly accurate. This works out to be 75000 minutes worth of crocheting or 1250 hours. This would be just over 52 days straight of crocheting. Obviously, crocheting for 52 days straight is totally unrealistic, so I won't be doing that. I'm also not trying to burn through lots of yarn and end up with an excessive amount of keyrings on and that I then have to try to sell or end up with them sitting around, gathering dust. The aim is to be sensible about this challenge, when I have a small-ish amount of yarn left over after making a larger plushie, I will use the left over yarn to make as many keyrings as that yarn will allow me. I may buy a few variegated skeins of acrylic yarn though because they're so much fun to work with and they make really cute keyrings.

Why 2500 keyrings?

I sold my car two years ago. It was a cute, little, pink Suzuki Alto and I absolutely loved it. I didn't use it very often and the battery was dead more often than not, but it was called Piglet and it was a great car. After selling my car, I shared my mums car with her and I still didn't use the car very often. In August, I sat my driver's test in the US and I passed first time. I'm not sure how much this can be celebrated because apparently I live in one of the easiest states to pass the driver's test, but it shall be celebrated nonetheless.

I currently share my husbands car, but he needs it for work during the week and then when he's home I get to be passenger princess. It does make me feel like I am heavily relying on my husband to do all the running around and I feel incredibly bad about this. It also limits what I can do during the day. I walked to the grocery store last week, which was fine, the walk isn't too bad. As I was leaving, someone cat called out their car window to me and it made me feel very paranoid walking home by myself and I was carrying 6.5kg of cat litter so I couldn't speed walk too well to make the walk faster. I want to be able to pop out for supplies or coffee when I need them or to go to the post office. Or to grab something during the day while my husband is at work, so there's a surprise waiting for when he's home. There aren't many places within safe walking distance here.

My keyrings sell for around about $5 each and I am trying to save $10000 to buy a car. Or at least, that much to contribute towards a car because I'm not sure, if realistically, that is a suitable amount to try to save for a car here. I've only ever owned cars worth around £1000 and that was in a totally different country. Things here are typically more expensive so I essentially just multipled that number by 10 to hope that it would get me a car that would hopefully last longer than my last three cars. I also assume that the number I need to reach will totally change by the time I actually reach that goal so it's a flexible goal. If I reach $10k in keyring sales and that number ends up needing to be higher, I'll make and sell more keyrings. If it happens to be lower, which I highly doubt, I'll use the extra to pay as much of my husband's car off as it covers. This is just about the only place I can say that without him possibly seeing it.

I've weighed up my options, in the UK, it's very common to lease a car and then buy it or choose a different one after the lease is up. Here, it seems more common to get a bank loan and buy the car while making monthly payments to the bank until it's paid off. I'm 99% sure, for the foreseeable future, I would not be able to lease a car or get a loan from a bank given that my credit score in the US is non-existent as I have not been here long enough and what bank is going to loan any money to someone who has lived in the country for 8 months? So, my final option is to save for one.

To sum it up, the ideal number is 2500 crochet keyrings made and sold, but the ultimate goal would be just "as many as possible". It would be amazing to be able to thing bigger with this challenge and save up for a house through keyring sales, but that seems even more unrealistic than selling keyrings to buy a car. You never know though.

I'm aware that 100% of what I make from the keyrings technically isn't mine because of the cost of materials, sales taxes, government taxes etc. However, I will be putting $4 from each keyring sale into savings and any extra expenses per keyring will pull from the sale of other products.

Where am I at so far with this challenge?

A few months ago, I challenged myself to make 500 mini whale keyrings. Since then, I've made around 50 heart keyrings and a few other styles and shapes. I'm guessing, I've made around 650 keyrings, which puts me around 26% of the way through the making half of this challenge.

I have sold some of these over the months, but I only started counting how many recently, so I'm sitting at 9 keyrings sold since I started this challenge properly, almost all of which are mini whales, which does make sense since that is the majority of the keyrings I've made. So, we are 0.36% of the way through the selling half of this challenge, which is not super high, but it's a start. I have two markets left of the year and I'm aiming to have reached 25 keyring sales in total for the challenge for 2024. Then the intense work can start in 2025. In all honestly, I've been absolutely terrible at promoting the keyrings on social media so all but one or two of the sales have come from markets.

If you would like to buy one of my keyrings, they are on my website. Alternatively, I have some of the patterns available on my supplies shop and if you have any suggestions/requests for keyring designs, please let me know in the comments.