The Ultimate Guide to Make Money with a Cricut

If you’ve ever wondered, “can I make money with my Cricut?” the answer is yes! Learn everything you need to know about starting a business selling the crafts you make with your Cricut Explore or Maker.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Cricut. The opinions and text are all mine.

Are you crafting for the holidays? As you make gifts for your friends and family, you may be wondering if there’s a market out there for your amazing Cricut crafts—could you actually make money with your Cricut?

If you work smart and pay attention to licensing and copyright, you can totally sell the items you make using your Cricut Explore or Cricut Maker cutting machine. This extensive post will help you grasp a lot of what goes into selling your Cricut creations. Get the most out of the best cutting machine of 2022!

Can I Sell Products I Make With My Cricut?

The short answer is YES, you can sell the products you make with your Cricut!

In this post we’ll talk about licensing, tips for cutting costs, adding value to your products, where to sell your items, and at the end I’ll share some ideas to inspire you to get crafting with your Cricut for profit!

Start here: do I WANT to Make Money with My Cricut?

Before you get started actually trying to earn a profit with your Cricut, take some time to think about whether or not it’s actually what you want to do. Here are some things to think about:

• Are you doing it just because your friends say your creations are amazing?
• Do you want to support your family?
• Or are you doing it for some play money on the side?
• Are you willing to deal with difficult customers (there are always difficult customers!)?
• Do you want to turn something you love to do into a job?
• Are you tech-savvy enough to set up a basic site or Etsy shop?
• Can you learn more about marketing on and offline?
• Do you have the time and space to start a small business?
• Do you enjoy crafting with your Cricut? Enough to do it over and over again?

I definitely don’t want to deter you from starting to make money with your Cricut, I just want you to be smart about it.

Your answers to these questions aren’t necessarily dealbreakers (though they might be!), but they will give you an honest assessment of how starting a small Cricut business is going to go for you!

All About Copyright

Let’s start with copyright and licensing. This is the area where you can get in trouble the fastest (and where it might cost you the most money!).

Disclaimer: I’m not an intellectual property lawyer, so this should not be taken as actual legal advice.

The Cricut Angel Policy

If you want to use images you’ve found in the Cricut Image Library, you can make things to sell under the Cricut Angel Policy. Read this policy carefully—there’s a lot in there! A few things to note:

• Most Cricut Access images are included under this policy
• Make up to 10,000 items to sell using Cricut images
• Do not sell just the individual images
• You need to include a copyright notice with your projects
• Do not include licensed content, like Disney, Marvel, or Martha Stewart images.

Personal Use vs. Commercial Use

If you want additional images, you can buy them from online shops. Do not just download images from Google and use them to make projects—you will almost surely be violating copyright.

If you buy from online sellers, make sure to read the terms of use of the cut file! Most images you might buy include just a personal use license. You cannot make things to sell with files that are just for personal use.

You may have the option to purchase a commercial license. Some files may come with a commercial license. Again read the terms!

Licensed Images

You may find images of licensed characters (think Elsa from Frozen or Iron Man from Marvel) on Etsy and in other shops. These are generally breaking copyright and you can get in trouble for using them. My advice? Stay far away from licensed images and fonts!

And again, you cannot use licensed images from Cricut Design Space to sell, though you can use non-licensed images per their Angel Policy above.

Starting a Cricut Craft Business

Okay, now that we’ve got that legal stuff out of the way, let’s talk about how to actually make money with your Cricut!

Narrow Your Cricut Craft Niche

One of the worst things you can do is decide to just make whatever people ask you to make. A tumbler here, a home decor sign there, birthday t-shirts after that. You’ll end up with lower margins, wasted product, and a confused audience.

Instead, narrow your product line down to one or two items or themes and then NAIL IT. I suggest picking something at the intersection of what you love to make and what is profitable (see below for pricing ideas). You want to enjoy what you’re making—and you want it to be worth your time.

When you’re trying to decide what items to make and sell with your Cricut, consider “added value.” This can include both additions to your product, or really niching down. This way you can charge a premium for your product.

Many people are making home decor signs, for instance—maybe your “thing” is adding paper succulents or hand-painted glitter accents. Maybe you hand letter and turn your lettering into decals for shirts.

If you’re making tumblers, maybe they are specifically targeted to teachers and come with a gift card holder. Maybe your onesie shop is full of cute things particularly for preemies.

If you’re one of the only people doing something, you can charge more! It also makes it easier to target your advertising, as you’ll see below.

One note—the larger the product, the harder and more expensive it will be to ship. You may want to save those huge home decor signs for your local craft fair. See the shipping section below!

Buy Materials in Bulk

If you’ve nailed down your niche, you can buy your supplies and materials in bulk. You can buy more tumblers or vinyl or mugs at a cheaper price if you buy in bulk. If you’re still making “one off” items, it’s much harder to shop in bulk.

If you’re making vacation t-shirts, for example, instead of buying regular rolls of iron on vinyl at a craft store, you can order in bulk to cut costs.

Cricut sells bulk iron-on vinyl and bulk adhesive vinyl.

Quality Really Does Matter

One of the fastest ways to tank your business is to produce a poor quality product. Word of mouth travels fast and you can’t change the ratings you get if you’re selling in an online shop.

Quality matters.

So when you’re setting up your business, make sure you can produce quality products, consistently. If you find your quality is dipping because you have too many orders, maybe put your shop on pause or hire someone to help for a short time.

Do what you do and do it well.

Invest in Your Business…Slowly

You don’t want to throw all of your money into your business right away. Start small and create a loyal following of friends and customers who love your product. Ask for reviews from them. They’ll start to recommend you to their friends if you produce a beautiful, quality, value-added product. If they start to buy and you start to get sales from people outside your inner circle, you’re onto something.

This is a good sign there is a viable market for your product!

Then start to set aside a small amount of your profits to put into growing your business. Whether that’s a second EasyPress, another tumbler turner, or advertising on Facebook, you can start to grow your business little by little.

How to Price Items Made with Your Cricut

Don’t Sell Yourself Short

I always get sad when I see people selling their Cricut products for super cheap online and at craft fairs. I can tell that those sellers don’t value their own time or talent!

So promise me—you will charge what your product is worth! Don’t sell yourself short. You will burn out quickly if you are barely making a profit (or worse, losing money!).

One thing to keep in mind: lower prices don’t necessarily mean higher sales. People will think you are selling a sub-quality product if you’re underpriced. Alternately, they will often think you’re selling premium quality product if you charge more.

Calculate Your Costs

Pricing is always difficult! You want to charge enough to make money with your Cricut, but not too much that your product won’t sell. You may need to play around with your pricing to find the price point that makes sense, but here are some good guidelines:

Start by calculating your costs. And I mean ALL your costs.

Let’s say you are making stenciled hand-painted Christmas signs. You will need to account for:

• The Cricut mat—use the same mat and make hashmarks on it until its unusable. This will tell you how many stencils you can cut with one Cricut mat
• Wood craft frame
• Stencil blank—use the hashmark method from above
• Masking tape—Figure out how much you use per sign
• Craft paint—draw a line on the bottle showing how much you use per sign
• Sponge stippler brushes—keep track of how many signs you can make before they wear out and start tearing
• Paint brush for touch-ups
• Cricut blade—keep track of how long it goes before you need to replace it

Total that up, and then add your TIME. Come up with a price you want to make per hour and add that to your supply cost.

Generally, your selling price is going to be somewhere between two to four times your cost of supplies.

You can also check other retailers to see if you’re in the right ballpark, but remember cheaper doesn’t always equal more sales.

Collecting Sales Tax

Check with your locality to see if you need to collecting and remitting sales tax. You’ll also want to set aside a portion of your profit for taxes. This is one area where you will want to consult your accountant!

Shipping Costs

If you are selling beyond just locally, you will need to do some research on the best and least expensive way to ship your product. You can calculate the cost of shipping into your price, but I suggest having it separate. With the pace of the world today, people are used to paying for shipping from smaller sellers.

If it works with your pricing module, you can always offer limited time free shipping as a value add during special times of the year like Black Friday or the anniversary of your shop.

Where to Sell Items Made with Your Cricut

Here are a few places you might want to sell your amazing Cricut creations so you can make money with your Cricut!

• Locally through word-of-mouth
• Local craft fair
• Local pop-up shop at your church, school, retailer
• Personal facebook page
• Facebook business page
• Facebook groups (make sure you have permission from the moderator)
• Your own online shop through:
  • Shopify
  • WooCommerce
  • Square Space
• Etsy
• Amazon Handmade Seller Marketplace
• eBay
• Instagram

Marketing Tools

If you need to drum up some business, here are a few techniques you might want to explore:

Word of Mouth Marketing

If you’ve made products for friends and they love them, ask if they’ll share with other people or on their social media feeds with a link to your shop or email address.

Platform Marketing

A lot of times, there are ways to “boost” or “feature” your content on your selling platform, like Etsy. Keep in mind you’ll see more competition during the busier times of year, but during the slower times of year fewer people are buying.

Facebook and Instagram Ads

The world of Facebook and Instagram ads is TOUGH. I have been playing around with it for years and have only ever had one particularly successful ad. Boosting posts never seems to work for me, either. So if you’re just starting out, I suggest skipping online ads until you get to the point where you can hire a professional to set them up for me.

Ideas for Cricut Projects to Sell

If you’re looking for ideas for projects to sell, check out these posts. Remember, find your niche and then customize it—pick one type of product and do it WELL. This is the secret sauce for making money with your Cricut!

Remember to check the licensing for any images you use from the following projects.

• Stenciled Christmas Sign from Hey, Let’s Make Stuff
• Giant Paper Flowers from Hey, Let’s Make Stuff
• Baby Quilt from Always Expect More (Cricut Maker only)
• Rainbow Glitter Tumblers from Happiness is Homemade
• Personalized Baking Set from Hey, Let’s Make Stuff
• Infusible Ink Coasters from Pineapple Paper Co.
• Hot Cocoa Mug Gift from Hey, Let’s Make Stuff
• Leather Wallet from Crafting in the Rain (Cricut Maker only)
• Leather Earrings from Hey, Let’s Make Stuff
• Reindeer Hot Chocolate Ornament from Hello Creative Family
• Bridesmaid Gift Ideas from Hey, Let’s Make Stuff
• Personalized Scarf and Mittens Set from That’s What Che Said
• Pantry Labels from Hey, Let’s Make Stuff

Whew! That was A LOT of words about making money with a Cricut! If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer them in the comments. Good luck on your new Cricut business!

Would you like to make a small business shirt for yourself? Check out my blog for this Small Business SVG and more!