How do we find enough beads?
When we first started our bead business, we thought shopping together would be the fun part. I believe another post mentions how we almost accidentally fell into business together after having too much fun shopping in Manhattan. We wanted our business to reflect our social conscience which meant making every effort to remove items from the waste stream, save them from the landfill as it were. This meant sourcing non-new beads.
But how do we find big enough quantities of vintage and deadstock beads to make enough packages to go around? And what is deadstock anyway?
Deadstock is basically stock that didn’t sell in the store the first time around. It might be a box of jeans that got lost in the back room and never put on the floor, or it might be a spectacular orange bead that a buyer from some fashion house fell in love with and over-purchased. Retail stores eventually sell these items to other vendors at deep discounts, sometimes even at a loss. This all takes a bit of time, so the deadstock items we find tend to be vintage, though not always.
The answer to how we find enough beads is it takes a ton of hard work. A shopping trip involves the entire day, usually two with travel included. The kinds of places that have quantities of beads that are the kind of quality we want are often huge, drafty warehouses. One of our best finds ever was in a giant hanger that also housed heavy equipment, like bulldozers and diggers and such. There was no signage on the building and we got lucky that the paterfamilias found us wandering around and brought us back to see the beads. His sons had no time that day, and he was leaving for a meeting, but he spent about twenty minutes talking to us about what we were looking for and how we were doing the bead packages. Then he took us out back and left us to crawl over shelves and around boxes covered in greasy diesel exhaust.
We were covered in grime and exhausted after our four hours of crawling around the warehouse, but we left with a treasure trove of gorgeous Mid-century Japanese glass beads, packed in newspaper of the era, which gave us definite provenance, something not always easy to come by.
Our shopping trips are usually a little less dramatic. Most of the other places we go to are more set up for wholesale shoppers, though they are always dusty, often organized chaos, and sometimes drafty. Once while we were shopping in Rhode Island we heard sirens over and over again during the five or so hours we were in the warehouse. It got colder and draftier inside the warehouse, but we finished up our shopping and only when we got back outside again did we discover that a huge storm had blown in and a street light had blown down.
We purchase our beads by the pound mostly. Some very special beads are priced per the each. It takes us so long to shop in part because most of the beads are in cardboard boxes that we have to open up to see into and they are generally stacked floor to very high ceiling, and in part because we have to count to make sure there are enough beads before we fall in love with anything for a collection. We’ve gotten pretty good at estimating if we’ll need one pound or two of a particular bead to make a collection.
Where we shop in Manhattan space is more at a premium and chaos reigns more freely. They tend to have larger quantities, so that’s never an issue, but it’s impossible to see everything on any given day, so each shopping trip has it’s own particular flavor and involves a bit of luck as to what treasures will be found. It’s physically a bit like playing twister, but fantastic finds are always garunteed.
Our favorite NYC Shop
We go home (or to the hotel) at the end of every shopping trip feeling completely fried. Our bodies ache from doing a million squats to see the bottom shelves, lifting a million boxes down from overhead, contorting to squeeze down a partially blocked aisle. Often I feel too exhausted to sleep, but always we are excited about several special pieces we’ve found. Since things have opened back up we treat ourselves to a meal from someplace we’ve never gone before, and I find myself thinking, “It’s nice work if you can get it”