Why Bead Styling

Bead Styling came to me when I started making beaded jewelry.


I got into the designing part quite by accident after being in the bead business for several years.  I am a researcher - probably should have made it a career choice - by nature and gobble up every bit of information - much of it useless; but when I started selling beads I knew that my fanaticism about researching every aspect of my latest interest would serve me well.


From the beginning I consumed all of the information I could. My New York suppliers were extremely willing to educate me and were quite patient - you do notice these these once you require multiple supply sources.


After a time my other natural ability - detecting patterns - came in quite handy too; as I noticed some very interesting patterns starting to develop - some were obvious as to being in a new business and literally learning from the ground up.


Yet other patterns where not so obvious, probably even to a seasoned bead artist, as with all artist and creative types we want to focus on your art and if your supplier is sufficient that's one less thing to worry about.


It didn't take me long to understand the obsession with beads - a story, perhaps, I will share at another time - when I started selling and making tons of money on eBay despite the tens of thousands of beads listed on the site - I knew I was onto something that could satisfy my curious nature and desire to start an online business.


The more my customers asked for particular beads, which, admittedly I had no idea what they were talking about; so I asked my suppliers and learned not only about bead colors, types, finished and more; but most important, that people took an enormous amount of time trying to locate the right bead color, correct bead type, the right bead stringing material to use with certain beads; and often had to settle because they just could not find what they really wanted.


Despite the incredible amount of beading books, bead magazines the pattern I was detecting was that people still needed some of the basic - and not so basic - questions answered.


Then when I started designing I understood completely.


Although my creative issues where quite in the reverse - I now know more about beads and this business that I thought I ever would, although, I still have a lot to learn; however, because of my bead resources I was able to pull together and match bead types, colors, finished from different bead manufactures and pull together a pair of beaded earrings rather quickly.


But I since I had on hand so many beads I ran into the problem of - deciding; you can have to much of a good thing.


But once I got better at coordinating everything I really started to empathize and appreciate, especially my first customers patience in me locating just the right items for their bead art projects.


Pretty much the way I laid out the Bead Stylist pages is how I would put together beads during my creative process but it takes up a lot more room and time to do it for each color every time I want to change up a color palette; so this really is a good tool, and time saver for me.


Please read the posts based on color palettes for a visual of how this works.