A little way off the beaten path, Mike Sills is doing something small and somewhat incredible.
He is making cake stands – big ones, small ones, plain ones and fancy ones – and selling them all over the country. Actually, all over the world.
A set of freshly-painted white cake stands sat recently on a cloth inside Sills’ north Rossville storage unit wood shop, a tabletop fan blowing on them.
Those are headed for Hong Kong, Sills said.
Sills is the proprietor of the hyper-small business that bears his name, Mike’s Amazing Stands. He has rented a powered storage unit near the Tennessee-Georgia line since 2009, originally just to store his tools and wood scraps since his home doesn’t have a garage, but making cake stands is now his full-time job.
“It keeps accumulating,” he said, glancing around at the scattered tools, the stacks of wood and the pile of cut-up tree trunk in the corner.
There is no restroom at the shop. The storage unit door is left slid up, there are space heaters here and there in corners and under tables.
It’s a low-budget set-up, but that’s OK. Mike’s Amazing Stands doesn’t need a flashy showroom, a tree-lined parking lot or a flashy LED sign.
Sills has an iPhone, and a literal world of customers out there across all seven continents.
Mike’s Amazing Stands makes its living on the Internet marketplace.
“If it wasn’t for the Internet, I would have no sales,” said Sills. “I think I’ve sold one stand in Chattanooga.”
Sills leans heavily on Etsy, the popular self-described “global community” of hand-makers, crafters and tinkerers like himself.
He estimates his Etsy sales were around $30,000 to $35,000 last year – not bad for an accidental businessman who had previously hopped around from job to job, and who is doing what he loves.
“A lot of people who run a business, they’re all about profit, profit, profit, profit, money, money, money, money,” he said. “When it comes to getting things out of here to the customer, that’s all I want to do.”
Sills is not abnormal in building a business through an Internet peer-to-peer marketplace like Etsy.
According to Etsy, there are more than 4,000 sellers on the platform in the U.S. alone, and only 1 percent of those running a business through the site obtained a loan to get started.
Nearly 40 percent of Etsy sellers in the U.S. are based in rural areas.
Sills bucks the mold, however, when it comes to the average demographic of Etsy sellers – 86 percent of whom are women, and more than a third of whom are under 35.
Sills is somewhere north of middle-aged, and because of the nature of his business, is sometimes a man in a woman’s world.
“I’m the red-headed stepchild of the wedding industry, of the supply end of it” he said.
He wakes up every morning around 4 a.m. and answers emails, sometimes from brides-to-be or planners who are in desperate need of one of Mike’s amazing cake or cake pop stands.
Sometimes “you can tell by their email they’re in tears,” he said. “Nothing I hate worse than disappointing people.”
Contact staff writer Alex Green at agreen@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6480.