How An Ex-Disney Animator Started a Jewelry Brand
Drop-Out To Designer
Back in 2016, I dropped out of art school to start working for Disney as a Background Designer on a show called DuckTales (woo-oo). I was overjoyed to keep learning design from extremely talented industry pros. Every day I fell further in love with design of all sorts.
I was also no longer a broke college student, and I started going to pop-up craft fairs like Unique Markets and Renegade Craft and marveled at the small, artist-crafted goods. At these markets (and on Instagram) I discovered the joy of the statement earring. I loved how they felt like illustrations come to life that you could wear, and it felt meaningful to purchase from small brands with an artist behind them. I was so inspired. I was also still discovering my style and felt like nothing quite hit the mark of what I was looking for. The super cute jewelry that was more my-style was made of fine metals and waaaay out of my price range, while some handmade pieces I bought were adorable but fell apart, tarnished quickly, or looked a little too handmade for my tastes.
I kept seeing the same artists year after year at the craft fairs, so I turned to Instagram to find new artists. After a spree of finding and following handmade jewelry makers on Instagram, I discovered a lot of them were using laser cutting to create their bold, colorful shapes for earrings. What is this magic? I thought. Could I make these too?
This was right at the time GlowForge and other at-home, compact laser cutting solutions came to market, but I was just out of college and renting a small apartment with 3 other roommates. There wasn’t any safe indoor space to put a full-on laser cutter! Except I soon discovered companies that would laser cut things for you, and laser cutting suddenly became accessible. I started designing the earrings of my dreams.
The Inspiration!
One holiday break from work, I was doodling on my iPad while looking at my parents’ Christmas tree. Ever since I was a kid, my parents have hung these simple painted wood ornaments on the tree. They were (and still are) my favorite. They’re toy-like, charming, tell a story, and have so much appeal. I later found out this style of ornament is a popular German toy called Erzgebirge, named after the region they’re hand-crafted in.
Look at how cute these Erzgebirge figures and ornaments are!!! Images from www.erzgebirgepalace.com
Inspiration struck, and I drew my first pair of painted wood earrings (now the Fresh From the Garden wood earrings!). When I got back to Los Angeles, I researched how to get my sketches laser cut in wood, learning all about the materials, how design complexity affects cost, and creating a vector files. Off my order went, and a couple weeks later I received sheets of wood with my designs cut out. This was the first time I felt the pure joy of seeing my sketches come to life!
The Process
After receiving the laser cut wood back then, I was hand painting each earring. At first I loved it. But after doing this repeatedly, I began to dread it. I knew I wanted to sell my earrings one day, but I’m so much of a perfectionist in execution that the tiny-scale paintings were taking me forever. My full-time job was also pretty demanding and I couldn’t spend as much time on my ideas as I wanted to. My heart was set on handmade, but my doing-too-much personality didn’t realize it wasn’t feasible, so I set my vision aside for the time being.
The hand-painting process and some finished early pairs. Also the beginning of making larger painted canvases!
The first earring sketches drawn on my iPad in 2017!
The years went by as I worked on a variety of animated shows at different studios, and landed a dream job art directing at Cartoon Network. I designed and painted new earrings every now and then after work when I wasn’t exhausted. All this time, I still had dreams of selling my earrings, but I knew I didn’t have the bandwidth to pursue that vision simultaneously.
Until the animation industry took a turn for the worse.
In 2024 my job ended, and for the first time in 9 years of working my butt off, I found myself unemployed in a totally dry industry job market, with nobody knowing when jobs would appear again (or if they ever would.)
The Pivot
I grappled with pivoting industries, getting retrained in a new field, and starting all over again (while trying to manage the grief of it all), when it hit me: What if I went all-in on my jewelry idea? It felt like now or never.
I didn’t want to go back to hand-painting everything. If I did, all of my jewelry would be so expensive to make up for the amount of labor involved, and my own pain point was wanting well designed things to be affordable! I also know the quantity of earrings I needed to make and sell in order to eat and pay my rent would burn me out. So what do you do after 2 months of being unemployed, wanting to scale your idea into a business without a clue about what you’re doing?
You start working with manufacturers of course!
And then after constantly researching jewelry making, figuring out the manufacturing & supply chain process through trial by error and having so much fun with it, you decide, I could totally make fully metal jewelry now with a manufacturing partner. (Right? Just me?)
So then you start working with another amazing manufacturer and get 3 of your designs created, but realize how little you actually know about jewelry and metallurgy and fabrication and what’s possible. You want to keep creating inventive new jewelry designs, but the internet isn’t giving you information fast enough. (A common experience of course!)
Going All-In
After about 5 months of setting up Friendly Folk and trying to learn as much as I could alone, I realized I needed to go back to school. I needed to physically work with metals to understand their capabilities. There’s a lot of science involved in jewelry that I couldn’t figure out without practical application.
I’m a little crazy in that everything I do, I want to give it my all. Especially when creating something that people are paying money for! When I get invested in something, my curiosity opens up a never-ending can of worms. In the world of designing jewelry, I was aware of my weaknesses and knew I needed to fully understand what I was doing in order to make intentional decisions with my business and create the coolest things I’d never seen. I also just like learning stuff.
So at 30 years old, this college dropout went back to school! I found an extremely affordable jewelry program at a community college and signed up. It was hands down the best decision, and I’ve had some of the best teachers I’ve ever had through the program. I think one of the best parts of being in school again was regaining a lot of lost confidence from being unemployed after being at the top of my career, then suddenly not. Learning a new skill is pretty confidence-building, even if it’s also uncomfortable. It’s easy to forget we’re all so capable of doing and loving new things. I’m more than just an animator, even though I really loved my career.
From my time as an Art Director in animation, I’ve found that the most unique creative solutions come from the fusion of unexpected things. What happens if you mix film noir with anime? What does an art style that fuses the look of textural vintage children’s books with CG look like? What does jewelry inspired by a career in animation look like? Our world is richer when we see it in new ways.
I can’t wait to keep learning and making! Thank you for following along with me. I can’t wait to see what you think. <3