· How I Came to Make Jewelry

On May 25th, I did a post here with my face on it (haha) where I told you some stuff about me that you might not know. I got asked by @namebrandesign to tell how I came to "make awesome modern jewelry" as she put it (<3 How sweet is she huh?!), so, here's that story!

So it's early 2006, and my friend Sandy was making jewelry herself at the time. She invited me to a bead shop for fun, and since I had made a bit of simple jewelry as a teen, I thought that sounded so cool and said yes! So we went, had a great time, and I got hypnotized by allllll the beads and tools and all that. I was there to just lurk around and spend time with my friend, and ended up buying for I don't know how much (it's been too long to remember but I imagine $75 must be about right.)

My goal was simply to make jewelry for myself, using tigertail string as a base. I was having fun and that's all that mattered! But what I looooved was chain. I got into exploring that, and then got completely obsessed with making jewelry. At the time I was a freelance graphic designer working from home, so I quickly outgrew the opportunities to wear my creations. I discovered Etsy, created some cool goose feather earrings (called Deploy) I thought were sellable, took somewhat bad (lol!) but necessary pictures, picked Nea as a name (I wanted it to mean "new", so "neo", but with an "a" sounded more feminine, so Nea!) and listed my first item.

A couple days later, I had the guts to email Grace from my fave blog Design*Sponge. She loved the earrings, featured me, and that was it! It started right there! 👏🏼

At first, I saw this simply as extra money to buy other people's handmade work (HANDMADE LOVEEE). But then I found myself creating more every evening on the kitchen table, Taking pics in the morning, having less desire to do graphic design, and I just couldn't stop! Haha ;) I made the full-time switch in 2008 after launching my Wall Wear pieces, and never looked back to this day.

So here we are, almost 11years later. My style has changed and evolved, and that's a great thing I think! Nea grows as I grow. And that's one of the things I love most about all small businesses.