Kate Drew-Wilkinson

It’s safe to say that Kate Drew-Wilkinson has immersed herself in the making, selling and teaching of glass beads. The Arizona-based artist says she’s “crazy” about her work, so much so that she has a gallery that has only her work on display. Drew-Wilkinson says she’s dabbled in many areas of the glass world — glass beads, jewelry and even pen and ink drawings. She’s spent most of her 25-year career making and selling jewelry, and these days she’s mostly experimenting with glass beads made from stained glass scrap. She was attracted to the material for its vast color variety. Drew-Wilkinson has taught countless workshops in the U.S. and abroad, has written many how-to articles in Lapidary Journal, and she’s written a few how-to books and produced several videos.

TCR: How did you first become interested in and get involved in working with glass, and how did your work evolve from where it started to the work you create today? More specifically, how did you go from larger glass works to beads...you also mentioned you have done some pen and ink drawings.

KD: I’ve been working in bead jewelry design since about 1974. It all began just after my son Noah was born. I wanted to work at home. I’d recently retired from acting and was making leather clothes and drawing on the leather with an electric pen. I’ve been drawing in pen and ink for many years. I used to draw up my jewelry designs before I owned a camera, but that’s another story!

I started collecting beads to use on the clothes and somehow one thing led to another. I traveled to Columbia to see a passing comet called Kohoutec and ended up in Quepos, Costa Rica with $150 to my name and a year old baby. I had a nice collection of beads in my suitcases and some basic tools because it’s always been my philosophy to work wherever I am to make a living ... and because I can’t stop.

So it began. I made jewelry on the beach and sold it to tourists ...(the glory days of hippydom). I returned to the U.S., and from then till now, I’ve developed a business in bead jewelry design. I also studied bead history and lectured at bead societies for a while, but once Sher Dubin’s magnificent book on the History of Beads came out, I knew I was outclassed!

Now, back to how I became interested in glass bead making. I was giving classes in bead jewelry making and design at the Second International Bead Conference in Washington D.C., in 1989. I put my head around the door of another classroom and saw a bead being made. The process was projected onto a screen and my life changed at that moment. A wonderful teacher called Linda Honeycutt LeGrande gave me my first lesson, and shortly afterwards I moved to Mexico. At the time I was designing and producing jewelry for the Nature Company. I sent them some samples of my new rather innocent lampwork beads. At that time, I don’t believe any bead makers had made it into a Catalog or such a huge number of stores, because there were very few glass bead makers in the U.S. and most of them, like me, were in the early learning process. Sylva Raker, the Nature Company buyer at the time asked me if I could make beads out of recycled glass. I knew I could not make anything really good with bottles because of the co-efficiency requirements in bead making, so I bought a huge barrel of scrap glass from a stained glass manufacturer, tipped it out onto a tarp in my garden, hosed it down to clean it, and went to work. Because the glass was in small shards, I had to hold pieces in a hemostat, warm them up and attach them to a punty before I could even start making a bead. So different from the simple process of picking up pre-made glass rods the way we do when using Italian or other makes of art glass prepared specifically for centuries to use in classical bead making.

I have been working ever since to show others this way of making beads with stained glass remnants. I’ve made two videos, now also DVDs, on the subject because it’s important for us to use the scrap rather than ultimately taking it to the dump and also because the color combining is so beguiling.

TCR: How have you pursued your career?...Can you provide a brief timeline of when you got started, and how your career has evolved?

KD: My career has been a non-stop process since I returned from my travels in Costa Rica and Mexico, when my son was a toddler. Before I ever knew anything about glass bead making, I was working with a variety of different beads. The first real line of jewelry was made with Swarovski Crystal and silver. I met the owner of a small factory in Inverness, California, a wonderful gentleman called Andrew Romanoff. The factory was in the old Creamery and was called The Brass Menagerie . Between us, we built up a really beautiful business. I went on the road to open new accounts, traveling to New York, Los Angeles and other huge cities. It was unbelievably hard for me because I didn’t learn to drive until I was 46, so I had to do a great deal of walking. I developed a way of dealing with L.A. I would go and have breakfast at a popular place called Dukes on Santa Monica Boulevard, and with practiced eye, spot a young actress who looked as if she might have time on her hands. I would get talking, (having been one myself,) and then ask if she would drive me around for a couple of days. I paid gas, meals and 20 dollars a day. This was in the ’70s.

I carried two different lines of jewelry. One was the Crystal line made at the Brass Menagerie, organized properly, pinned on velvet trays and coded. The other consisted of all my experiments, using semi precious stones, bone, crystal, glass and, well you know, just magical and fun. The buyers could immediately increase their stock at any given boutique with the Instant Gratification line and pay me on the spot. That money went to support my expenses on the trip and my life in general. The orders on the Crystal line from the Brass Menagerie went to be made up there, and for that, I simply took royalties on the wholesale price. It worked very well. We were discovered by a rep. company from the wine country called Salesman’s National Brokerage, a very efficient organization took us on and we grew to about 300 accounts across the U.S.

My heart was broken when they took on another line, very much like mine, if you follow, but made with cheaper metals. I saw what was happening, Andrew and I closed the line and I went on from there with my Instant Gratification line, selling to some of my old accounts, and growing the business on my own. I knew quite a lot about selling by that time and had made it into a couple of small California catalogs. I approached the Nature Company with my stone bead and silver line and they took it up. At that time they had about 11 stores. I worked a deal with Sylva Raker by taking a cut in the price of the order in exchange for having my name in their catalog. That is an important piece of information in my opinion. I grew with them, the orders got bigger and bigger and I employed several youngsters to fill them. It was fun. I lived on a houseboat in Sausalito and still didn’t know how to drive a car!

Having my name in the catalog certainly helped with my other sales, and I employed my own sales staff. Around that time, I met my future husband, an English journalist. Things changed, we moved, I closed the studio and we moved several times in the next couple of years. I managed to keep my business going and always filled my Nature Company orders. In the seven years I sold to them, not a single piece of jewelry was ever sent back for repairs. I’ve always made my jewelry very strong and wearable.

The Nature Company grew and grew and I stayed on track. At one point we moved to Mexico and that was when I began making glass beads with stained glass scrap for them. It was crazy. I had to train young Mexicans to make the beads and employ local women to hand tie the necklaces. I had to import the little silver beads and silver Dolphin clasps because the Mexican silver was not the same as the work in the items going into the catalog. The catalog was going out to more than 10 million homes and I nearly went crazy with the stress of it all, meeting deadlines, bussing up to the border with great bags of necklaces, crossing the border back to the U.S, and going to a postal store to buy packaging to send the orders off to the Nature Company in time.

When I returned from Mexico in 1993, I moved to Bisbee, Ariz., and self-published two books. The first one, "Basic Wire Work For Bead Jewelry Making," I wrote because there really wasn’t a book out there about how to do classical wirework. The second, "How to Be Successful in the Bead Jewelry Business," was written for the same reason.

Both books are selling faster now than they did when I wrote them. They are very innocent in their presentation, and illustrated by me. I also made my first "how to" video, a companion to the wirework book.

At some point a few years after I moved to Bisbee, I realized I had made 1,500 "Earth Beads" for the Nature Company and I knew I’d had enough. My books and first video were doing well and I wanted to do other things, travel, do shows and have more fun. I dropped away from the Nature Company and shortly afterwards, they went bankrupt. I was relieved not to have been stuck in that situation. They were wonderful to me and I will be forever grateful for everything I learned while supplying them with unbelievable amounts of merchandise. My husband moved away to South Africa, I found myself alone, content and busy as usual. I made a couple of films with the help of my son Noah called "Making Beads with Stained Glass Remnants" parts 1 and 2 because I wanted to share this lovely new way of making beads.

TCR: Who is the market for your work? What is your strategy for reaching them?

KD: My wirework information sells in stores and to those who are finding their way into that kind of work. The glass bead making videos (and soon the DVDs) are flying out of the lampwork glass and tool suppliers and through my gallery and Web site. I’m now really dedicated to making glass beads for my gallery and collectors, and helping others to try the delightful dance of bead making with small shards of glass.. The glass videos are very easy to learn from and I’ll be making more. In the meantime, my latest one is called "Lampwork Bead Jewelry Design Made Simple" and was made to help the rapidly increasing number of people learning lampwork to turn their beads into marketable goods.

I find the whole movement of bead jewelry making at this time fascinating. When I first began, about 30 years ago, there wasn’t much interest in this kind of work -- it was considered hippy work and not relevant to serious gallery owners. Things are different now, with the growing awareness of bead history and the movement in the U.S. toward treating all kinds of beadwork as real art.

How do I reach the public? Well that too has changed. I’ve written nearly 50 articles for Lapidary Journal over the years and will write more. I’ve encouraged numbers of my bead working friends to do the same in order to gain name recognition and have steered my editor toward other artists whenever possible. I’ve learned, (along with driving a car now for 20 years, how to get around more easily) how to use a computer, how to run a Web page, although that learning process is still difficult for me, and I was the first to teach wirework at a large conference on beads in Santa Fe. I can say this with confidence because I have been in the bead business for so long and have watched the changes along the way.

I went to England, my home country, to teach bead making first in 1998 and continue to do that. There is a wonderful Glass factory, founded in 1776 in the Midlands, owned by Barbara and Richard Beadman, where I do classes whenever I can. I am also working with friends at "Entree En Matiere" a bead store and glass making studio in Normandy, France. I try to go every summer to both. As a result, my reputation for glasswork and jewelry design is growing in Europe and I love that!

The other part of my strategy is to do my best to be in as many books on glass bead making as I can, but I do fail there often because I am either out of the country when an author is working on one, or I miss deadlines. Lark Books is my favorite publishing house and I hope to write my own book for them soon. I have the table of contents done and they like that ... so we will see. I also give away postcards and catalogs to the ever-increasing stream of people who visit my gallery, and I have a presence on Internet lampwork forums.

I make all the jewelry for the gallery with some help from two young apprentices and I am run ragged from morning till night. The lampwork beads sell so fast I don’t know how I cope. All I can say is that I adore my life, my work, my apprentices, my dog and my town, so all is well!

TCR: Where does the bulk of your business come from...is it wholesale shows? Direct to gallery sales? High-end retail shows? Commissions? How do you make your living from this art?

KD: It’s hard to say where the bulk comes from. I feel a little bit like an octopus. There are always so many directions in my business that constantly need my attention. When I see how many orders of books, videos and tools have gone out in a year, I’m amazed. The gallery items move fast and I’m training my two apprentices to take over some of the mileage, for instance, the hand knotted necklaces, the chain work, the mounting of my beads as pendants and that kind of thing. I don’t do wholesale shows any more. I’ve been making my living from this art form for 30 years now... am I the oldest? Certainly one of ’em.

TCR: Have there been major turning points in your career as an artist?

KD: The turning point that I remember the most was the day first saw a glass bead being made.

TCR: Do you see any business challenges specific to artists who work in glass or specifically in beads? How have you overcome these?

KD: Yes. The main challenge as I see it is gaining name recognition, which is pretty vital if you want to make a successful living in almost any field. These days, you can throw your name around and it can carry you for a while simply as a result of your being good at marketing, but it can only last if the work you do also speaks for itself. It takes time and money to create a good marketing plan, but as I said before, writing for magazines is probably the quickest way to attract attention to you and your work.

The Internet has changed everything so much. The fact that you have an online presence with your magazine is a demonstration of what can be done for the artists you interview. I have no doubt that my work and I will reach a larger audience simply as a result of my dancing fingers on the keys of my computer, and the opportunity you are giving me now.

As for overcoming things, it would take a book to tell you how much I’ve overcome to get to this point. If you’re only driven by the money you want to make in any creative endeavor, the end result will be very different from those who work with passion and love. Those of us who cannot and do not want to stop, are usually reaching for new ways to speak through our work resulting in joy and excitement, which transmits itself to our buying public.

TCR: What has been the most difficult thing you have encountered in your work?

KD: The management of paperwork and the paying of bills. It’s super boring and confusing to me. I wasn’t educated to work with numbers and they’re a mystery to me. Thank goodness a retired Colonel from the Air Force and his wife read about me, came to find me, befriended me and took over my paperwork for a year recently, resulting in the smoothing out of my problems. Angels really. I can move forward with all my ducks in a row.

TCR: What, in terms of business insight, have you learned to do or not to do over the years?

KD: Stay away from credit card debt first of all. Don’t be afraid to ask chosen friends for advice. You don’t have to take it, but it can give you a wider perspective. Face the truth about why things are going wrong and be honest with yourself and everyone else. Keep in touch with suppliers when you cannot pay their bills. If you’re honest and hard working, good suppliers will bend over backwards to help you through the thin times. They have been there too.

TCR: How has the Internet affected your business?

KD: Enormously.

TCR: What is the next step for you?

KD: My biggest ambition is to get my DVDs into every high school library in the country. Other than being able to get in touch with Oprah Winfrey, I don’t know how I can succeed there. I don’t have the time to work on approaching the right people because I’m too busy making more. Children are not being given much of a chance when it comes to using their hands and I know my videos are unthreatening and easy to follow.

I want to spend more time lecturing, writing and empowering “newbies” in the field of glass bead making and jewelry design. I keep getting fascinating invitations to teach in special circumstances, for instance in an orphanage in Southern India. It’s a question of finding the time, which is running out at my age!

For more information about Kate Drew-Wilkinson, visit www.katedrew-wilkinson.com.

Table of Contents | Home

---