Here for the jewelry, not the story? Four pieces that carry eighteen years:
Garnet Moon Necklace$125 
Garnet & Citrine Glass Necklace$55 
Moss Agate Mala Bracelet$85 
Garnet & Amethyst Glass Bracelet$45
Eighteen years ago I picked up a bead and couldn't put it down. That was the business plan.
Yak bone, from Nepal. Brass and turquoise set into it by hand, one tiny piece at a time. You have to lean in to see what somebody did there.
Some context on where I was standing. I'd been a traveller. I worked on a Greek island, lived in Australia as a kid, went diving, went places on very little money and figured it out when I got there. Then I was a stay-at-home mom in Calgary with a two-year-old and a four-year-old, and a husband gone half of every month to exactly the kind of countries I used to go to. (He's my wusband now. Same man, better word, and I'm keeping it.)
He came home with stories. I'd been to the same grocery store eleven times. I'm not bitter about it. It was the trade I chose and I'd choose it again. But my world had gotten very small, and here was this bead someone far away had spent a whole day on, a surface the size of my thumbnail. I wanted to know everything. Who made it, how, why bone, why brass, why that blue.
That was the door.
The official start date is April 3, 2008, at Heather's home party. We met in baby group and she said I should do home parties, then hosted the first one. For years I told it as "well, Heather suggested it." Eventually I noticed a suggestion doesn't last eighteen years unless you really wanted it. Heather opened the door. I kept walking through it.
Jewelry by Andrea, made in the loft while the kids napped. I still work in that loft. Since then the business has changed its name twice and so have I, which is pretty much the same story told two ways. Here's what happened in between, most of which I couldn't see while it was happening.
The loft years. Everything one-of-a-kind and heavy with the beads that started it. If you bought from me back then, this shelf is what you were choosing from.
2008–2012: The loft years
Community centre shows, home parties, the Body, Soul and Spirit Expo, and Kananaskis Country Christmas at Redwood Meadows, one of my favourite weekends of the year.
A community centre table, set up and torn down in a day. I did hundreds of these. It's where I learned women don't ask for amazonite. They ask for the blue one.
January 2011 was my first time in print, a little write-up in the Calgary Neighbors Newspaper about a stay-at-home mom running an online business. I gave it one post and went back to work. That became a habit.
September 2011 felt like three years in one week. My first international order shipped, to Croatia. Seven of my pieces were accepted into upcoming issues of Bead Trends Magazine. And I enrolled in an Enhanced Jewelry Certificate at the Alberta College of Art, where incidentally I learned I don't need to create all parts of the design, I like it when the beads and components come to me pretty. My artform is creating with the components not making them.
Namaste, in Bead Trends. One of seven accepted that week. I bought the issue, then filed it under nice, but not real.
I posted about Croatia like it was the moon landing. Then came Moscow, Cuneo, Loire, Kauai, Austria and Switzerland, and every one got its own post. The traveller in me, going places by parcel.
What I didn't do was count any of it. The business grew every year as the kids got older, exactly how I built it to, and every year I called it not enough. I wasn't comparing it to itself. I was comparing it to a number that was never mine.
I wasn't tracking my wins. I was tracking a number that was never mine, on a scoreboard I never agreed to.
Around then my work started showing up around the city, at Owl's Nest Books in Britannia, Yoga Santosha and a few others.
2013–2015: The year everything opened at once
On February 7, 2013, jewelrybyandrea.com went live. This was before you could pick a theme and go. My friends Darren and Lena built it, and built it so I could run the important parts myself. My head has been stuck in a computer ever since.
In October 2013 I started blogging. Tree of Life, the Hamsa, the Lotus, prayer wheels, what the tusk means. Same instinct as the bead: find out, then tell somebody.
Shannon, my first model. Two Pisces introverts who met at the far end of the school pick-up line, where you park if you don't want small talk. Our kids have known each other since kindergarten. She's worked shows beside me, she writes for me now, and she's part of what comes next. She's been here since the start and has never once needed to be asked twice.
Then came October 24, 2013. Nina Dobrev wore my Garnet Moon necklace on The Vampire Diaries, and I still remember exactly where I was standing. Two weeks later my Rock Star earrings were gifted to Selena Gomez after her Stars Dance concert. In January 2014 my Elegant Earrings went into the swag bags at the GBK Golden Globes Gift Lounge, and Cosmopolitan gave away one of those bags. For a while Garnet Moon sold faster than I could make it.
Emily Deschanel wore The Masks We Wear on Bones. Nobody has ever mentioned this to me, so I will: the mask shifts position through the whole opening scene.
Each of those got one post, and then I went back to packing for the next market.
I treated every one of those as moments, not a foundation.
A TV placement doesn't pay the mortgage, so it didn't feel real. It took me until this year to put the proof somewhere it can't scroll away. The full As Seen On list lives here now.
2016–2019: The spreadsheet years
In 2016 I joined the Flourish & Thrive Mastermind and got serious about growing.
Yoga was the shape of my workday: kids to school, 9am hot class, then heads down from eleven to three, often without getting up once. For my first lifestyle shoot I hired a yoga instructor who also ran a photography business, and other instructors modelled in exchange for images. None of us knew what we were doing. Some of those photos are still the most creative work anyone has made with my jewelry.
Serious meant spreadsheets. Flourish & Thrive taught me how to cost a piece properly, right down to the finding, and I'd teach that to anyone. Every bead, every clasp and every metre of wire went in. Then I timed myself making it, packing it and standing at a table selling it. If you've never watched a creative person do this to their own work, it hurts. Truly my head felt like exploding and not with creative energy. You take the one part of your life with no clock on it and you install a clock, suddenly your time spent becomes a cost.
Then there was the other spreadsheet. My wusband built one to tell me if I was profitable, and to be fair it was beautiful work. It charged me for paper, for office space inside our own house, for every hour of designing. It was a balance sheet.
It had no line for learning, or reinvesting in myself, or turning a passion into something that pays. No line for the stones I saved for years to have custom grown, cut and set, risks that paid off later or didn't, and never inside the month I spent the money. No line for trying something and having it fail, for putting myself back into the world while being there for the kids first, or for the unpaid labour the whole business was balanced on.
Green when I was profitable. Red when I wasn't. So many of my events came back red.
Events where I sold thousands of dollars. Where my booth was three deep, I sold hundreds of products daily, made with my own hands, ideas from my head, and I didn't sit down for nine hours. Where I met women who are still on my list today. Where the kids came to help and grew up around artists who'd built real businesses out of their hands and their stubbornness. Where I learned how people choose jewelry, and put every penny straight back into the business. The formula called that a loss. I call it the reason I'm still here.
Red. Red. Red.
That spreadsheet came up again and again over the years, and it was traumatic. I did every part of this business myself except the spreadsheet, and the judgement that what I did wasn't enough. The message was clear: I could make so much more if I went "back to work." If it didn't end in a profit, or enough of a profit, it was a hobby.
Eight years of my life, colour-coded by a formula somebody else wrote.
So here's the number that was never on the sheet. I have never written down or owned publicly. I sold six figures of jewelry, assembled by my own hands, standing at events all year long, as the primary parent.
I didn't build the machine that judged me. I imported it. I typed my own numbers into it at the family computer and took its word over mine. And I believed everything I was told: always be closing, ABC, if it isn't profitable, it's a hobby.
The formula wasn't wrong. It just had no cell for a woman three deep at a booth learning what her customers reach for, and I never once thought that might be the formula's gap instead of my failure.
I thought I was part of a "we" working toward the same thing. It was just me. My partner was a VP in oil and gas, and I'm not sure a creative business can ever measure up to that on paper. His work took him to the places people put on a list and hope to get to once. Mine took me up to the loft. Two weeks out of four I ran the house alone and built a business in what was left over. I only recently learned to say that without softening the first half.
That's why it grew the way it did, slowly and then faster. As the kids got more independent I could say yes to bigger events and whole weekends. Grow, grow, grow. Always be closing.
And remember when this was. I pitched media every month, by hand, one editor at a time. That's how British Vogue happened in June 2018: an editor's last-minute email that I answered inside the hour. (Every placement, with dates, is in As Seen On: The Real Story.) I contacted costume designers directly, found lists, joined groups and got my work on TV that way. No ChatGPT, no tools. I built the spreadsheets, ran the timings, designed the pieces, cast the models, booked the photographer and art-directed the shoots.
None of that has a photo. Nobody takes a picture of the two hundredth pitch email. So a day that looked like nothing was often a day where a lot got done. Nobody could see it, least of all me.
The hardest part wasn't the hours. It was going from one-of-a-kind to repeatable design. My brain physically hurt. Making one perfect thing and making something you can make again are two different jobs, and they run on two different parts of your head. I also knew the switch would cost me customers. The women who loved the one-of-a-kind work wouldn't find what they came for anymore. There's no cell for that one either.
The sneeze
I hurt my back sneezing. No fall, no accident, nothing to point at. After years of working the way I worked, my back was done negotiating.
What followed was ten years of yearly radiofrequency ablations where the nerves in my lower back were lasererd off: a month of recovery, then close to a year of being able to function until they grew back, with a lot of pain and a lot of stubbornness. I'd work an event, come home and collapse, and keep trying to get stronger.
It's in this post because of the decision that came out of it. I moved the centre of gravity to my own website. Not as a growth plan. It was the only version of the business I could run on a bad day. A market needs me standing for nine hours. A website, designing, creating jewelry I could do that from home, sometimes bed, which is where a lot of this got built.
It turned out to be the best decision I ever made. It's why I survived 2020 and why the business works now. I'd love to say I saw that coming.
What I wouldn't recommend is doing it alone. I built almost all of it myself, from home, often in pain, with two kids who were nothing but loving about it. But they're my kids. I'm supposed to be the one looking after them. I never got comfortable with that trade.
Most makers have the same fantasy: make the thing and it magically sells. It doesn't. I wanted a real business, so I did the unglamorous half too. All of it, myself.
And here's something I've never said out loud. I turned the spreadsheet green. Not VP money. Steady, real money, month after month, that I moved into our house account. "A contributing member." To the house, to the family. I'm saying it plainly because for years I let a red cell tell me otherwise.
I kept learning: Flourish & Thrive, then Marie Forleo's B-School, then Denise Duffield-Thomas.
I had real growth plans. A bit of what people would call woo, sure, and a lot of design underneath it.
And I had a direction. My dream has always been the beach. I have a whole post about the water in Greece that named a colour I'm still chasing. So from landlocked, snowbound Calgary, as a stay-at-home mom who put her kids first, I designed a tropical resort collection. The traveller was still in there, just working from home.
In January 2020 I did MODE Toronto, my first wholesale show. I flew there alone, set up alone and pitched my business for five days straight. I sold to coastal Canada and came home sure the southern focus was right.
Next was a Palm Beach wholesale show in April 2020, booked and paid for. Buyers for cruise lines, the coastal US and the Caribbean. It would have been my first time crossing a border to sell. That was the dream, with an actual booth number.
Six weeks out, the world shut down. They returned my payment.
2020–2022: The part I've never written about
2020 was curbside pickup, orders hand-delivered across Calgary and Zoom Easter with my parents. Every market cancelled. I filled the few orders that came in and did a lot of crying. My marriage broke down that March, hence the wusband. Nobody had it good that year, but my Covid was not filled with sourdough starters.
Then in the summer of 2021 I was hacked, and it took almost everything.
It took my Meta accounts, Instagram and Facebook. Thirteen years of being on facebook, the only record this business had. Years of contests and email sign-ups, and every one of those followers was a real person I'd gained one at a time.
My email was hacked too, and it sent spam to hundreds of people in my name. That hurt my email deliverability badly. Hello, spam folder.
My site was hacked. The creepy part is that it happened a month before I knew. Someone had quietly moved me from admin to staff member, and when they decided to take over, they kicked me out of my own store. Shopify was spectacular every step of the way. Truly do not use the same password on all sites!
I got my email back, then dealt with deliverability problems for years. Social media is still affected. My reach hasn't recovered to this day.
At the time I read it as a message from the universe: this isn't the right path for you. I got things back months later by refusing to stop asking, and I never said a word about it publicly.
From the outside it looked like two hundred and twenty-two days of nothing. I've written about that separately, because it needs its own room.
People have asked me for years how I did it. Meanwhile I am sitting in the actual chair thinking, who me? what am I doing? I've never been able to fake it till I make it. I'm a blurt-it-all-out and regret-not-reeling-it-in person, which some days is a poor fit for running a spiritual jewelry business.
So the hack was only part of why I went quiet. The rest was a question I couldn't answer: do I keep going? And if I do, she needs a new name, and I didn't know if I had that in me. The marriage was over and my name went with it, which is a lot of paperwork before it's anything else. A rebrand on top of that, with no foundation left to build from, didn't seem possible. For a long stretch it wasn't moving forward so much as refusing to quit. Molasses, in a direction I couldn't see the end of.
And something I've never written about: it took my creativity. My brain had always been something to contain. Reel the colours in, into designs, spreadsheets, creations, sales, repeat. After all of it, my brain sat grey. For years, longer than I could have imagined. For a while I thought maybe that part of me was gone.
On November 3, 2022, at the Signatures Festival of Crafts, a show it had taken me five years of applying to get into, I posted a new name:
“Welcome Mystic Soul Jewelry. Still Andrea here 🙂 I truly am a mystic soul & this change speaks to my heart.”
I was proud to be there. I reclaimed my maiden name and the business came with me. My new signage arrived mid-event, so I changed the name partway through the show, between customers. I have no idea what people thought. It was Covid, I was focused on survival, and everything was messy.
Mystic Soul is the most accurate name this business has ever had. I didn't put it on after a hard year. I grew into it.
Not sure which stone is for the chapter you're in? The Gemstone Quiz takes 60 seconds.
2023–2026: Coming back on purpose
The rebuild wasn't pretty. For a while I posted constantly and said almost nothing: emoji, exclamation marks, seasonal filler. It looked like a brand doing its job. It didn't sound like anybody.
The fix was embarrassingly simple. I started writing the posts again. Real sentences, not "elevate your mystic soul journey." Why I reach for labradorite in March. The weekend I sorted my entire studio by colour and my back never forgave me. That one changed how I sell, because women don't walk up asking for amazonite. They ask for the blue one.
The habit I didn't notice until I read it all back
I've never once had trouble celebrating somebody else. Scrolling eighteen years of my own posts, it's impossible to miss. I tagged the photographer every time. I named the other jewelry makers, the ones I was supposedly competing with, lovely people whose work I want to see do well. I shared other small businesses at markets while we stood three booths apart selling to the same hundred women.
One small business owner to another: wishing them wings, flight, sales, growth and nothing but good. I meant it and I still do. Community over competition is how I think a room should work.
What I can see now is that I gave other people the words I never gave myself. Nina Dobrev wore my necklace on television and I posted once. Somebody else's launch got three posts and a story. I could write a whole paragraph about why her work deserved your money, then sit down to write my own and manage a product photo and an exclamation mark.
I used to call that humility. I've stopped. It's the same borrowed scoreboard in a nicer outfit. If a win only counts when it belongs to someone else, you've found a very generous way to never count anything.
So I'm doing for the woman at this bench what I've done for other women a hundred times. Once.
Maori and Plumeria earrings. I designed these years ago and I still sell them, which is its own answer to whether any of it worked.
Eighteen years. Three names. Two kids raised alongside it. A hack, a divorce, a pandemic, a back that quit (I did get it sorted eventually, but that's another story) and a rebuild. And it grew every single year anyway.
Wings, flight, sales, growth and nothing but good. To her too.
The full circle
I never fully let one-of-a-kind go. I still bring it to every event, because of the face a woman makes when she realizes there's exactly one of something and she's the one holding it.
The bohemian years on my studio shelves. Bigger, heavier, more carved. I only notice these shifts in hindsight. It starts quietly with what's inspiring me and what I'm sourcing, and by the time it shows on a shelf I've already been somewhere new for a year.
Now it's a feature instead of a leftover. My Coven and Circle members get first look at the one-of-a-kind pieces before anyone else. The thing I thought I had to give up to be a real business became the thing I could finally offer properly, once the business was real enough to offer it in. I didn't plan that. I just kept going until the circle closed.
The rest built itself the same way, one honest reason at a time.
Glass & Light is what I make at my bench. It's stunning, it's my favourite, and I'm allowed to say that about my own work now.
Spiritual Symbols is where the yak bone bead ended up. Every tradition, no judgement, no gatekeeping. I want to know what people believe and why, and then make the object that holds it. My sociology degree came in handy after all, and now I look forward to the writing and the learning.
Spirit Animals is for the part of me that's always been more comfortable with animals than with rooms full of people.
Gemstone Jewelry makes me laugh. My dad was a science teacher, and I swore up and down I'd never follow my parents into anything. He'd pull over for every roadside rock and cut bank, and I'd stay in my seat, nine years old and deeply unimpressed. Now I think about those rocks all the time. I've built a whole business out of stopping the car.
The thread
Three names: Jewelry by Andrea, Andrea Kelly Designs, Mystic Soul Jewelry. Two of them changed because my own name changed, which tells you how personal this has always been.
Three logos, one bench. Same soul, new chapter. Thank you for being part of the journey, whichever name you found me under.
What never moved is the same thing that made me pick up that bead in 2008, in a loft, in the smallest year of my life. I make objects that mark where you are.
Croatia. A divorce. A daughter's graduation in Paris. A Tuesday you needed to get through. The stone doesn't care which. It just holds the date. Nobody else's formula gets a say in that one.
Eighteen years and I never once quit. I just disappeared now and then. From the outside those look the same. From in here they never were.
Six I'd have a hard time letting go of
People ask what my favourite is like it's a trick question. It isn't, the answer just keeps moving, and my favourites surprise me more than they should given I chose all of them. Right now it's garnet, citrine and emerald together: deep red, warm gold and green. In eighteen years I'd never reached for that combination, and now I can't stop looking at it. Luxe, a little French, and still grounding.
The garnet and citrine necklace is Shannon's pick too. Eighteen years after she first modelled my work, we still reach for the same piece, and you know it's good when we both own one.
Which stone is for the chapter you're in right now? Or which animal has been following you around, or where you feel it?
Next from me: I read 3,268 of my own posts, and what they told me. It lands January 12. Join the Circle and you'll see it first, along with the one-of-a-kind pieces.
Keep Reading:
- Zakynthos: the Greek island that named a colour
- As Seen On — the full television and press list
- Butterfly meaning in jewelry: transformation and new beginnings
- How to build a crystal bracelet stack from scratch
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: When did Mystic Soul Jewelry start?
A: The business began on April 3, 2008 in Calgary as Jewelry by Andrea, with a home party hosted by a friend. It became Andrea Kelly Designs in 2017, and Mystic Soul Jewelry in November 2022, when Andrea reclaimed her maiden name. Same maker, three names.
Q: Has Mystic Soul Jewelry been on TV?
A: Yes. Nina Dobrev wore the Garnet Moon necklace on The Vampire Diaries in 2013, Emily Deschanel wore The Masks We Wear on Bones in 2015, and Li Jun Li wore several pieces on Wu Assassins in 2019 — the first time Andrea worked directly with a costume team. The full list, including British Vogue (June 2018) and the Golden Globes gift lounge (January 2014), is in As Seen On.
Q: Is the jewelry made in Canada?
A: It is Canadian-designed. Some pieces Andrea makes and ships herself from her Calgary bench; others she sources and curates. She has been a Spruce Meadows International Christmas Market vendor since 2017.
Q: Where can I see the pieces in person?
A: The Spruce Meadows International Christmas Market in November is Andrea's only Christmas event of the year. Dates are announced here on the blog and to the email list first.
Q: What does “one-of-a-kind” mean here?
A: Some pieces are made in small runs and some exist exactly once, built from stones in Andrea's personal stash. Those live in One-of-a-Kind Treasures, and Coven and Circle members get first look.
