20 min. read
Carolyn Newsom
Virginia "Bootsie" Ehrlich
Chapter 01
Starting point
Carolyn Newsom and her sister Virginia, who everyone calls Bootsie, weren't looking to become online sellers. Far from it. Carolyn had spent 20 years climbing to executive director at a non-profit. Bootsie had been a financial planner, an insurance agent, and a teacher. Good careers. Steady paychecks.
Then their parents passed away within a few months of each other.
The loss came with new responsibility. The sisters took over the care and part of the financial support for their brother, Neill, a diabetic and double-leg amputee who lived several hundred miles away from their Texas home. That distance changed everything. They needed work that bent around family, not the other way around, and they needed income they could count on.
The people settling their parents' estate had a suggestion: try selling things on eBay.
Neither sister had ever sold a thing online. It was, honestly, a foreign concept to both of them. But in 2007 they listed their first items anyway, mostly Gorham plates, silverware, and china that can fetch decent money to the right buyer.
Chapter 02
Opportunity
The plates sold. So did the next batch of finds. And that early excitement quickly ran into a practical problem: you can't keep customers coming back with an empty shelf. They needed more inventory, and they needed it regularly.
So they built the early catalog around things Bootsie genuinely loved. Dolls. Bears. Children's clothing. Before long, wholesale suppliers started approaching them, and the sisters began buying some lines in bulk, plus-size women's clothing among them.
That last category turned out to be the real opening. Carolyn noticed the plus-size market was, in her words, badly underserved, and she leaned into it.
They named the business Bootsie's Boutique and started listing on eBay in earnest.
Chapter 03
Breakthrough
For a while, the numbers were modest. A few hundred dollars a month. Encouraging, but nowhere near a living.
The turning point wasn't a viral product or a clever ad. It was a supplier problem. About a year in, the original suppliers stopped carrying the products the sisters relied on, which is the kind of thing that quietly kills a young store. Carolyn went hunting on seller forums for a fix. That's where she found SaleHoo.
They picked it over other directory services for two reasons: the sheer range of vetted vendors and product categories, and staff Carolyn described as "amazing, helpful."
Within a year of joining, Bootsie's Boutique went from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $50,000 a year (founder-reported).
Chapter 04
Supplier and product lessons
This is the part most new sellers underestimate. Carolyn used the SaleHoo directory to find vendors for each niche they moved into, and a lot of those relationships stuck. FashionGo for women's clothing. The Immediate Resource for prom dresses. Entertainment Earth for action figures and toys. Crayon Kids Fashion for kids' wear. Many of those are suppliers she still works with today.
On the bulk-versus-dropship question, the sisters land mostly on buying wholesale, with dropshipping reserved for select items like gift baskets. Carolyn's view is that dropshipping is a sensible way to start, because you skip carrying, packing, and mailing everything yourself. If you're weighing the two approaches, SaleHoo's own breakdown of dropshipping vs wholesale covers the trade-offs.
But she has one non-negotiable when vetting a dropship supplier, and it's worth tattooing on your arm:
She credits a big chunk of the growth to exactly this. Quality goods, from dependable vendors. Get that wrong and no amount of marketing saves you.
Chapter 05
Marketing and growth
Carolyn's playbook here is refreshingly unglamorous. Make your eBay listings as complete, honest, and interesting as you can, partly because it helps with SEO. List often, so there's life moving through the store. Update constantly: new pictures, fresh prices, more detail in titles and descriptions, fully filled-out menus and item traits. Her phrase for it is "data is king."
The sisters also did the homework. Online courses, articles, SaleHoo's educational videos. Carolyn's blunt about how much of it they used: a lot.
Then there's social. Between them they've built a combined 70,000 followers on Twitter, and they run Instagram and Facebook alongside it. Her tactics are simple and repeatable. Set up automatic tweets whenever you list or relist an item. Get friends to retweet and cross-post, and return the favor. The goal, she says, is a steady stream of backlinks pointing at your products.
And they didn't bet the whole business on one marketplace. Bootsie's Boutique expanded onto Bonanza and Etsy too, which spreads the risk if any single platform has a bad month.
Chapter 06
Result
Within a year of using SaleHoo, the store grew from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $50,000 a year, according to Carolyn. On eBay they climbed from bronze to silver level and earned top-rated seller status, with positive feedback from more than 5,000 customers.
The margins tell their own story. Most products sell at roughly double the wholesale cost, Carolyn reports, and genuinely hard-to-find items can go for, in her words, "ridiculous amounts." Lower-margin lines like gift baskets and silk arrangements run closer to 20 to 25 percent, since dropshipping carries extra costs.
The lifestyle result mattered just as much as the money. As an executive director, Carolyn was working 65 to 80-plus hours a week. Running Bootsie's Boutique, that dropped to around 40, with the freedom to work while traveling.
They also built something quietly moving out of all this: a subsidiary called Neill's Deals, named for their brother, selling mostly children's toys. The proceeds helped cover his living expenses and healthcare during the years before he passed away. The sisters now donate that income to children's and veterans' charities.
Chapter 07
Where SaleHoo fits
Carolyn and Bootsie's story is a clean illustration of why supplier reliability decides whether a store survives its first rough patch. Their breakthrough came the moment their suppliers fell through and they replaced guesswork with a vetted directory.
For sellers following a similar path, that's exactly where SaleHoo slots in: the supplier-research stage, before you've sunk money into inventory or built a brand around a product you can't reliably restock. The sisters used it to find vendors for every new niche they picked up, from prom dresses to action figures, and to read up on which markets were worth chasing next.
The takeaway is simple. Move fast on products, sure. But don't treat your suppliers as an afterthought. They're the part that has to keep working long after the first sale.
