Dana Whitfield

Dana Whitfield cut her first piece of HTV in 2017, at a kitchen table, onto a shirt for her niece. By 2019 the kitchen table was a dedicated room. By 2022 it was a shed in the backyard with a dust collector, three rolls of glitter HTV, and a second Cricut because she did not want to keep swapping mats.

She now runs a small custom HTV shirt and car-decal shop in the Midwest, works mostly by local word of mouth, and sells on Etsy for tourism-driven traffic in the summer. She is the person other shop owners in her Facebook group message when they want to know whether their bulk quote for a local sports team will actually leave money on the table.

On Crafter Margin, Dana writes every Cricut, HTV, and vinyl decal calculator. She tests every formula against actual recent orders from her own shop before it ships. She is allergic to the phrase “just charge more,” because she has watched three people lose regulars that way.

Professional background

Dana’s shop is a 14-by-20 foot shed in the backyard of her house in rural Wisconsin, forty minutes from the nearest small city. It has two Cricuts, a Silhouette, a 16x20 swing-away press, a small laser she added in late 2024, and a chest freezer full of candle wax flakes because her kitchen ran out of room. The shed is heated. Barely. She wears a hoodie from October through April.

She started the business in summer 2017 while working part time at a county clerk’s office, and took the shop to full time in 2020 when remote school meant her kitchen table could not be a workspace anymore. She cleared $28k her first full year of full time work, $46k in 2022, and has been in the $72k to $85k range since 2024. She still does her own books, with some help from a local accountant at tax time, and still does every heat press cycle herself.

Dana sells through three channels. Etsy is her summer traffic, because her area gets lake-tourism visitors who want custom souvenir shirts. Local word of mouth is her year round base, mostly sports teams, small-town businesses, and school clubs ordering volume at once. Faire is her newest channel, opened in 2024, and she moves about fifteen percent of her volume through there now to a handful of small boutiques in Minnesota and Iowa. She still does two in-person markets a year, including the Midwest Makers Market each September, where her booth won a small best-booth ribbon in 2024 that is pinned next to the thermostat in the shed.

Teaching and speaking

Dana says yes to appearances when the audience is other working makers, and says no to general small-business events, because she does not think a shirt shop in a shed has much to say to a software startup. Recent appearances include:

• Guest on The HTV Room podcast, episode 58, July 2024, on quoting bulk sports-team orders without losing money on rush jobs.
• Taught a hands-on workshop, Pricing a Bulk Shirt Order Start to Finish, at the Midwest Makers Conference in Branson, October 2025.
• Regular contributor to the Faire Seller Digest, 2024 to present, with two pieces on wholesale pricing floors for solo makers.
• Moderator of the Midwest Maker Shops Facebook group, roughly 6,200 members, since 2021.
• Featured in a profile in the Kenosha News, April 2025, on home-shed craft businesses and the local economy.
• Panelist at the 2025 Faire Seller Summit (virtual), June 2025, on pricing for wholesale accounts when you still have a strong direct-to-consumer channel.

How she verifies the numbers

Dana runs every formula she publishes against at least five recent orders from her own shop before the calculator goes live. She uses real invoices, real press cycles, real shipping receipts, and real Etsy and Faire fee lines. If a formula produces a result more than a couple of percent off from her actual books, she does not ship it. She rewrites it.

She re-verifies supplier pricing quarterly against Siser, ThermoFlex, her candle wax and fragrance supplier, and her laser consumables vendor. When a catalog change or fee change affects any of her published calculators, the page gets a visible updated-on date and a short note on what changed. The full process sits on our methodology page, and corrections are handled according to our editorial policy.

What she covers

• HTV shirt pricing, including bulk, sports-team, and rush-order pricing.
• Vinyl decals, car decals, window clings, and sticker pricing.
• Cricut Maker and Explore ROI against project volume.
• Silhouette Cameo workflow trade-offs versus Cricut for production.
• Heat press sizing, swing-away versus clamshell for shed shops.
• Candle and soap cost of goods, including fragrance and packaging.
• Resin pricing and the cost of fixing bubbles at scale.
• Fiber arts and crochet pricing when hours-per-piece is the constraint.
• Laser engraving cost per minute for small diode and CO2 machines.
• Booth break-even math for regional craft fairs and indoor markets.

What she does not cover

• Tax strategy, S-corp elections, or anything where the answer changes by state. She is not a CPA and will not pretend to be.
• DTG and DTF printing at any serious scale, because she does not run either in the shed and will not quote what she does not use.
• Embroidery, because her one attempt at a used commercial machine ended in a weekend of untangled thread and a firm no.
• Pricing for print-on-demand drop-ship shops, which is a different game from making product yourself.

Contact and corrections

If a price on one of Dana’s pages looks off, or a calculator disagrees with what your own shop is seeing on real orders, write in. Include the calculator URL and the specific line that looks wrong. She reads every note, even when the reply takes a few days, because August is a busy month in a shed in Wisconsin. Reach her at dana@craftermargin.com, or use the general form on the contact page. Our editorial policy covers how corrections get logged and published.