Toasty Peel Shop — a print-on-demand store built as a sandbox for my kids. They design what goes on it, run the shop themselves, and keep what it earns.
My kids wanted to sell things they had made. The usual answers are a lemonade stand or a table at a craft fair, and both of those end when the afternoon does.
Print-on-demand does not. A design goes up and it can sell at two in the morning to somebody three states away, with nothing sitting in boxes in the garage. The goal was a real shop—real products, a real checkout, real money—small enough that they could run it themselves.
A working storefront at toastypeelshop.com. They decide what goes on it and what it is called; I set up the plumbing once and then stayed out of the way.
What I did not expect was how much of running a business it teaches without anyone sitting down to teach it. Which designs sell and which ones only you liked. Why a photograph of the thing beats a paragraph describing it. That a price is a decision and not a fact. It started as somewhere to test an idea and turned into the most instructive project on this list.
