Elyse Burns started selling hand-painted canvases on Etsy the week she turned 18. This year, at 28, her art business brought in nearly $5 million in revenue and paid off every dollar of her law school debt.
Burns opened her first Etsy shop in 2015 and sold two paintings within a week. By 2020, her company, Elyse Breanne Design, was pulling in six figures $360,000 that year while she was still in law school, working at Duke’s First Amendment clinic over the summer.
“I was doing exactly what I wanted to do legally, and I was still kind of like, ‘man, I just want to get this done with for the day so I can paint,'” Burns said.
The pivot that changed everything
Burns joined TikTok in 2020 and started posting about running an art business while studying law. Viewers responded to the split identity. She also began selling her designs wholesale through Faire, a platform connecting brands to retailers and that’s when growth really took off, she said.
As the business became a livable income on its own, Burns started rethinking the plans she’d made for paying off her law school loans plans that had assumed either a high-paying corporate law job or Public Service Loan Forgiveness through public interest work.
“I feel like everybody knows you can make a good living as a lawyer, and you can’t as an artist, and that’s sort of like the stereotype and the thought,” Burns said.
What her business sells now
Elyse Breanne Design has grown well beyond hand-painted canvases. The company now sells stickers, coloring books, stationery and home goods. After finishing law school, Burns went all in on the business full-time, and revenue has grown sharply since reaching nearly $5 million last year, according to CNBC.
The loans that once shaped her career planning are gone. Burns has paid off her law school debt in full through the business.
