Meet Liz Rivers of The Laser Outpost

When you first meet Liz Rivers, you’ll instantly notice her sly grin. It’s the kind of grin you might expect from a former police officer with over 24 years of experience and a thing for jokes. “If I pulled you over to give you a ticket, I had a knack of wanting to hear jokes. I’d be like, Okay, you did this, this, this, and this, but if you tell me a good joke, you get to go.” One man wasn’t having it and responded: “Young lady, knock it off - I have shoes older than you!” (Liz wasn’t convinced - he ended up with a ticket.)

Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she was 13 years old when her mom brought the family back to Tarrytown, just north of New York City.

Liz still lives just 30 minutes north of Manhattan. She says it’s the best of both worlds: she gets to recharge with her husband by the lakes and the mountains (Liz is a self-professed “nature girl”) but has easy access to NYC and all of the cultural goodies it has to offer. Liz has a passion for the 3 things New York is best at: Broadway shows, food, and - of course - shopping! Take it from Liz: “If you don’t find it in New York, they don’t make it.”

This is the spirit that first drove her to experiment with laser cutting. At the time, the ever-crafty Liz had graduated from cutting out stickers with her Cricut to sublimation printing. She was making and selling primarily tee shirts, cups, and signs. In 2019, she was making door signs by sublimating a print onto a laser-cut sublimation blank. “I didn’t know what it was cut on. I placed my order with this supplier, and they arrived damaged. Tip number one - do not sell what you don’t have!”

Caught between an unresponsive blanks vendor and the prospect of having to refund all of her customers, she did something that only a crafty & creative gal like Liz would do: she decided to cut out the middle man. “I said, you know what? I’m spending four, five hundred dollars a month with you - I’ll show you! I’m gonna find out how you make these blanks.” A google-session later, and Liz came across Glowforge. After more research, she realized she needed more production capability for the volume she was anticipating. To get more information, “I joined the bigger boys’ groups, and they were talking about stuff that I have no idea what they’re talking about.” Fortunately, Liz met Aaron Cherman, who took the time to explain some of the laser world’s technicalities, but more importantly, he recommended Liz look into Emily Caroline, AKA That Mom With A Laser.

“I remember being in my patrol car and private messaging her... ‘I hear that you have a big laser, can I call you?’ And you could sense her hesitation, but me thinking that everybody knows that I’m a friendly individual, I said to her, ‘Don’t worry, I’m a cop!’ As if that made a difference.”

After the phone call with Emily, Liz decided to pull the trigger, so to speak. And when her brand new Mira 9 arrived in spring 2020, it was time to get to work! At first, she had trouble finding a local community of crafters to turn to for creative and business advice, so she had to practice and learn on her own. “I was crashing my laser head. I didn’t know much about the software, so it was a lot of trial and error.” But through this process, Liz learned a lot about how her laser actually worked. The more she learned, the more she made - and she started selling to family, friends, her community, and, as she put it, “anybody and everybody who would buy from me.”

This was easier said than done, though. Right as Liz’s business was starting up, all her customers were shut down, stuck at home during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic. But Liz’s friends were so interested in what she was making that the lockdown was hardly a barrier for them. “I would have Zoom parties with my friends and be like, look what I’m making! That’s how it started.” On top of that, Liz and her coworkers were still going to work every day - so her fellow police officers became some of her first customers.

As the lockdowns began to ease up, Liz started showing her work at local craft markets. “I love the markets, I just hate the setup... three times a year I do markets, mainly in the holiday season.”

Liz’s main products in the early days were tumblers & cutting boards, but now she carries more specialized stock for holiday shows.

Due to her inexperience, during her initial days, Liz found the task of preparing her market inventory to be quite daunting. At her first show, she sold hardly anything. Liz candidly described her display as “really awful.” The experience taught her firsthand the importance of presentation as it directly influences sales.

For the second show, she focused more on her display and prepared accordingly, assuming that a better display would lead to more interested customers. She prepared 20 of each item - and sold out. Next time she made 30 of each item, which seemed to be her sweet spot.

One thing Liz doesn’t do much anymore is year-specific ornaments; if there are any left over at the end of the year, they’re nearly impossible to get rid of. And her biggest seller? You’ll never guess. Go on, try.

Spoons. Snarky wooden spoons. “I must have sold, at one market, 92 spoons. I didn’t bring enough.” (Did you guess right from the post on our page? Let us know on the Laser Focused Facebook page!)

So Liz seems to have cracked the code on her local markets, but where does she get her business sense from? Based on our conversation, there are two key elements. As cliché as it may sound, her friendliness and passion have each been integral to her success.

As a police officer with a background in social work, Liz didn’t have much formal business education. But one advantage her career gave her was a level of comfort with being social and open to new connections. “I’m not for everyone, I know that.” But many who know Liz comment on what a ray of sunshine she is.

More importantly, though, it was her passion for the work that drove her. From the beginning, Liz loved working with lasers, and that kept her coming back every day to make something new. As her hobby snowballed into more and more sales, her husband pointed out that she needed to formalize the business for tax purposes. Even then,

Liz says that it didn’t truly become a business until she retired from the police force and dedicated her full day to her laser work. “Up until that point, I was doing whatever I wanted... now I actually have a product line. I only do spur-of-the-moment [pieces] to spark my creativity, [for] friends.”

Liz’s current product line includes glass ornaments, spoons, engraved jewelry, tumblers, and wooden greeting cards. She sells online using Shopify, but her main traffic comes from her community.

And what a community! Liz started two Facebook groups that have been an important part of her development as a laser user and an entrepreneur. You may already know The Laser Outpost, a group she started while she was recovering from an injury on duty. “I was bedridden. So I started going into the groups and helping everyone. Liz decided to start the Laser Outpost as a strictly educational group with no sales - a group that currently has about 4900 members. Liz describes it as a place where people can ask for help and get non-judgmental answers. “[People come] to learn. It’s strictly to share to learn; it’s strictly a community.

Over time, she observed a need in the community for jewelry blanks, yet found no one filling this void. So she became a jewelry blanks dealer herself and started another group to help fill in this gap: a group with the oh-so-catchy name “XTool F1 Fiber Laser and Jewelry Blanks.”

In the XTool F1 Fiber Laser and Jewelry Blanks group, Liz sells high-quality jewelry blanks to the laser community while also “showing them how I test the pieces and what results they can expect.” While this group does link directly to Liz’s website (so you can purchase the blanks), the purpose of the group, Liz says, “is to provide high-quality laser jewelry blanks while educating laser users so they can make informed purchases and avoid the kind of catastrophe I experienced early in my time with sublimation blanks.”

Liz now owns a fiber laser and a diode/infrared laser in addition to her CO2. As you might have guessed already, one of Liz’s main lasers right now is a portable XTool laser, which has both a diode and an infrared mode. Using this with a heavy-duty battery pack, she is able to do certain custom orders at shows - even outdoors. “They get to pick a name, and I have pre-chosen phrases... [I] stay away from [detailed] personalizations that take a long time. You don’t make much money out of that.” Liz describes it as a game changer. “People just looking at that light - it immediately attracts [them]. There’s a fascination over things made on the spot.”

Despite purchasing it for its portability, it’s one of the lasers Liz uses the most. “It’s actually sitting in my dining room... I have my little filter, and when we’re all watching TV or whatever we’re doing as a family, I’m involved. I’m not away.” The flexibility of a portable diode laser is helping Liz balance her work and family life much more than if she werestuck in the garage all day.

Ultimately, if there’s one thing that embodies so much of what Liz has brought to the laser community, it’s this piece of advice she got from somebody in a group: “When you surround yourself with like-minded people who are willing to see you grow and are there to support your growth, you will grow.”

And her parting advice for all our readers? “Do what makes you happy... I was lucky enough to find two jobs that I loved, so they didn’t feel like work. So find something that makes you happy, and try to convert it and make a living at it.”

“You got this. Work hard towards your goals, find like-minded people, find passion in what you’re doing, and you’ll succeed.”

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Article by Adam Roberts