Buyer beware. As fads go, this one promises to be fleeting.
Beads and bead work have been around for a scant 102,000 years. As yet, there is no sign they’re gaining any traction in the culture. A memo Beads Santa Barbara co-owner Andy Nelson seems not to have received.
“Every generation discovers beads and bead work, and they find a new unique way to make things out of them, to define and express themselves,” he said.
Beads Santa Barbara, 137 E. De la Guerra St., has been a local institution for 26 years. Owners Andy and Barbara Nelson have been at the quiet epicenter of Central Coast bead and precious stones-purveying for that time, traveling the world in search of small-scale artisanal loveliness and bringing it home to their shop.
They go to great lengths to meet with their sales reps, many of whom produce their art in some of the farthest-flung places on Earth. The shop itself is awash with the varied pastel hues of the home planet. The walls and horizontal surfaces are festooned, draped with color. Amid these candy-colored riches, Andy Nelson has the serene comportment of a gentleman bohemian: unflappable, becalmed, a pleasantly grinning Cheshire HepCat.
Today, he sports modest bead work through an open-collar work shirt. Barbara is his perfect yin, an effervescent presence and practitioner of the controlled enthusiastic outburst. They both clearly adore where they’ve landed. With a product line that dates back to the Pleistocene, it also may be assumed that they are untroubled by the daily Trend-O-Meter.
“They say that bead work is one of the first forms used for storing information outside the brain,” Barbara Nelson said. “While the reptilian side of the brain was busy helping us survive by instinct, at a certain point we took a leap as a species, the leap to art. Beads were at the forefront of that process. Art that we could wear to convey our inner selves.”
She pulled out a book showing a time line of the known history and prehistory of beading, beautiful and intricate work with bone and shells and stones. Before we could articulate, we spoke and gestured through art. Art was language. Andy Warhol’s soup can was a distant entrepreneurial conceit.
Hailing originally from the Miami area, Andy Nelson had a thriving leather business there. Then in the 1970s, the bottom somewhat fell out of the leather trade, and he began ruminating on greener pastures. As he was casting about for a next move, he received a serendipitous invitation from some of the sandal makers in Santa Barbara whose product he’d been selling through his shop in Miami. He came, he saw, he resolved to live here. It happens.
“I fell in love with the place, told everyone in Miami I’m closing and moving. And that’s what I did,” he said. “But there was no point in opening another leather shop here, that industry was pretty dead.”
Nelson landed in Hermosa Beach for a couple of years, all the while trying to devise a business model that he could bring up the coast to Santa Barbara. In short order, he met his life partner, Barbara, a hostess in one of Santa Barbara’s iconic epicurean destinations, and he received an invitation to visit a bead shop in Laguna Beach. Lightning struck. Again.
“We said, ‘We want to do this,’” Andy Nelson said. “And we just took it from there.”
The couple secured a location for their new dream business, and in 1984, the original Beads Santa Barbara opened next to what was then the Mission Movie Theater. Today, it’s called the Metro 4.
“At one time or another, we occupied shop fronts on either side of the theater,” Andy Nelson said.
The business took off like a bejeweled rocket. In time, the Nelsons had three shops — two in Santa Barbara and one in San Luis Obispo. Soon enough, the business required 16 full-time employees to keep it flowing, and the logistics of maintaining what was becoming a small empire began to overwhelm.
The artistic impulse that had driven them to start the shop had become subsumed in the gray-flannel workaday of keeping a thriving business afloat. They stripped Beads Santa Barbara back down to its essence, and that is where they are today — a modest shop stuffed to the rafters with beautiful wearable artwork from around the world, and all the necessary components to build one’s own heartfelt statement.
The Nelsons constantly travel abroad in search of the most beauteous beads, stones and objects d’art they can find. Greece, India, China and Africa — the map is an open invitation as they follow bead leads to the goods, wherever those leads take them. They bring their haul home to Beads Santa Barbara and their increasingly appreciative customers, who these days come from across the United States to patronize what has become a must-visit for the initiated.
In August, sister store Blue Lotus Jewelry opened for business next door. Blue Lotus, an eccentric (and vaguely kaleidoscopic) one-stop for everything from feather-based jewelry to glass art, paintings and sacred objects, is a joint venture of Barbara Nelson and daughter Erica, a fine artist in her own right whose meticulous glass creations dazzle.
“We have regulars who come from all over the country, and whenever they’re in the area they make it a point to come to the store on a particular day,” Andy Nelson said. “A lot of our customers tell us they choose SB as a vacation getaway to come to us. We have become a destination over the years.”
And what a destination. Beads Santa Barbara is the sort of place that, on a treasure map of yore, would’ve been indicated by a big red X, with Thai and Bali silver, gold vermeil, freshwater pearls and gems, bone and shell beads and pendants, Swarovski crystal beads (an Austrian specialty crystal bead whose history dates back to 1895), and antique beads of European provenance found along the West African coast, whose like have been traded there since the 16th century. Not to mention Ethiopian red glass beads, Russian Blues, Agate beads from Botswana, Mali clay beads, Dutch glass rings and so on. This is not the stuff one finds displayed beneath a layer of dust in the nether regions of a T-shirt shop.
“We’re geared toward making fine jewelry,” Andy Nelsons aid. “Not all bead shops do that. Our reputation has grown as the place to go for the good stuff. And that’s a big difference from most bead shops that sell a lot of trinkets and junk.”
But this seeming treasure trove of riches is not without its limits, which are self-imposed.
“We find that the countries that are most conducive to this kind of business are often the least stable. Whenever something happens like the blood diamonds, or the blood rubies in Burma or something like that, we avoid those places and products,” he said. “We’ve never sold ivory or been involved with coral, for ecological reasons. We’ve always tried to maintain our own ethical guideline; what’s right, and what sustainable.”
And maintaining a robust and dynamic inventory has never been easy. Ever heard of a bead graveyard?
“We started ahead of the bead shop curve and schooled ourselves really well, and so avoided ending up with graveyards of beads,“ Barbara Nelson said. “We’ve been to people’s warehouses where there are just tons of beads that didn’t sell. In this business, those are called bead graveyards.“
The Nelsons feel that, after 26 years of accessorizing their friends and neighbors in Santa Barbara, they have drawn a bead on the locals — what they want to wear, and what sort of people they are.
“The people of Santa Barbara really are special, different,” Andy Nelson said. “This place breeds creativity and creative people. It’s a uniquely creative town. And they appreciate what we do. We couldn’t be in a better spot.”
Not to mention that Santa Barbara and beads go back a long way.
“This area has a rich history of beads. The word Chumash actually means bead people. The Chumash would take shells and grind them down and then string them, and native traders would come from all over the southwest to trade whatever they had to get these beads to take back,” he said. “So this area, as beads came increasingly to be used as a sort of legal tender, came to be a sort of Fort Knox of beads. So there is a deep history of that here.”
— Jeff Wing is a Noozhawk contributor.