Downtown merchant is out to bead the odds

Published 1:51 pm Thursday, February 11, 2010

Cindy Carroll first became interested in beadcraft shortly after a car accident in 2000.

After a few years of building her bead inventory, her husband said he “he wanted the house back” and demanded she move her beads elsewhere. 

“I’d taken over the house and turned the craft into a business,” she said. “So he told me to find a place to open a store and he’d give me the money to get started.”

Carroll, of Port Orchard, opened her first store in Bremerton in 2006 but soon outgrew the 500 square feet.

So when Brenda Kruse closed her downtown Port Orchard antique shop last year, Carroll jumped at the chance to occupy a larger space in a better location.

It’s no secret the economy isn’t great and businesses are hurting. Carroll’s Bead It Etc. store is providing locals with a challenging, fun and inexpensive hobby that will keep their minds off of the economy.

Shortly after opening, Carroll added a scrapbooking component to her business, providing the tools to create artistic books full of memorabilia.

Carroll didn’t see any benefit in the scrapbooking business and was about to close it down when a friend suggested a reorganization would help things along.

So later this month she plans to split the store in half and separate the scrapbooking from the beadcraft.

Digital photography has automated the process of scrapbooking, giving people the ability to create professional-looking layouts.

Carroll doesn’t support the digital version, so instead she helps people pull together projects that would exist in pre-computer days.

“With some scrapbooking programs, all you need to do is point a mouse,” Carroll said. “That’s not especially creative.”

Aside from opening the store six days a week Carroll also teaches three night classes.

On the fourth night she becomes a student, learning new beading techniques in order to maintain her own skill level.

It’s possible to work off a beading design much like those for needlepoint, but Carroll favors a more “freestyle” process, so she sketches out the design and adds the beads individually, following the image from the drawing.

Beading is labor-intensive and it can take days to complete an intricate piece. While there is a market for beaded jewelry — especially at crafts fairs — the item price might not average out to a fair hourly rate.

Even so, Carroll said it’s possible for a bead enthusiast to make a profit.

“If you take your stuff around to crafts fairs, they’ll sell,” she said. “Since the fairs are all in the fall, you can make things for the rest of the year and have enough to sell when the fairs are happening.”

Carroll is optimistic about the downtown location and credits Delilah Rene — who has opened two new businesses downtown in recent months — as a source of optimism.

She also thinks that downtown’s success has a lot to do with merchants’ attitude.

“Sometimes I’ll be here on Sunday doing the books and someone will look in the window,” she said. “I’ll invite them in to look around. Even if they don’t buy anything, it’s great PR to let them in when I’m closed, because they’ll tell their friends I’m here and the type of person I am.”