Eighteen years ago I picked up a bead I could not put down, and that is the entire business plan.
Yak bone. Nepali. Brass and turquoise set into the surface by hand, one tiny piece at a time, at a scale where you have to lean in to see what somebody actually did there.
I need you to understand where I was standing when I found it.
I had been a traveller. I had worked on a Greek island, lived in Australia as a kid, dived, gone 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, a four-year-old, and a husband who was 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'd come home with stories. I'd been to the same grocery store eleven times.
I don't say that bitterly. It was the trade I chose and I would choose it again. But I had gone quiet in a way I didn't have words for, and the world had gotten very small, and then here was this bead — made by hand, somewhere far away, by someone whose whole day had gone into 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.
April 3, 2008. That's the official start date, Heather's home party. She's the one who said you should do home parties, and then she hosted the first one.
For years that's how I told it. "Well, Heather suggested it." Somewhere in the double digits I noticed I was still saying it, and that a suggestion doesn't survive eighteen years unless the person it was made to wanted it that badly. Heather opened the door. I'm the one who kept walking through it.
Jewelry by Andrea, made in the loft while the kids napped. I still work in that loft today.
Since then the business has changed its name twice and I have changed mine twice, which is more or less the same story told two ways.
Eighteen years on I'm the same woman at a slightly better bench. What follows is what happened in between, most of which I could not see clearly while it was happening.
The loft years. Everything one-of-a-kind, everything 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. Kananaskis Country Christmas at Redwood Meadows, which was 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. This is where I learned that women don't ask for amazonite — they ask for the blue one.
January 2011, the Calgary Neighbors Newspaper ran a small write-up about a stay-at-home mom running an online business. My exact words that day: "First time my business has made it into print. Yipee!"
Then September 2011 did the thing where three years happen 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.
Namaste, in Bead Trends. One of seven accepted that week. I bought the issue, then filed the whole thing under nice-but-not-real.
I posted about the Croatia order like it was a moon landing. Moscow came later. Cuneo, Loire, Kauai, Austria, Switzerland. Every single one got its own post — the traveller in me, going places by parcel.
And I never let myself count any of it. The business grew every single year as the kids got older, exactly the way it was built to, and I filed each year as not-yet-enough, because I wasn't measuring it against itself. I was measuring it against a number that was never mine.
I wasn't tracking my successes. 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 — Owl's Nest Books in Britannia, and Yoga Santosha, among others.
2013–2015: The year everything opened at once
February 7, 2013 — jewelrybyandrea.com went live. This was before the drag-and-drop era; you didn't just pick a theme and go. My friends Darren and Lena built it for me, and built it so I could run the parts of it that mattered myself. I have had my head stuck in a computer ever since.
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 the people who don't want to make small talk park. Our kids have known each other since kindergarten. She has worked shows beside me, she writes for me now, and she's part of what comes next — which is a long way of saying she has been here since the start and has never once needed to be asked twice.
Then October 25, 2013 happened.
Nina Dobrev wore my Garnet Moon necklace on The Vampire Diaries. 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, Elegant Earrings went into the swag bags at the GBK Golden Globes Gift Lounge, and Cosmopolitan gave a pair away. British Vogue came through in the same stretch.
There was a period where Garnet Moon was selling faster than I could make it.
Emily Deschanel wore The Masks We Wear on Bones. Nobody has ever mentioned this to me, so I'll mention it myself: the mask shifts position through the entire opening scene.
I gave every one of those a single post and went back to packing for the next market.
I treated every one of those moments as a week, not as a foundation.
Same wrong scoreboard, doing its work. A television placement does not pay a mortgage, so it did not register as real. It took me until this year to put the proof somewhere it cannot 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 wasn't a hobby, it was the shape of my working day: kids to school, 9am hot class, then heads-down from eleven to three, often without getting up once. So when I needed my first lifestyle shoot I hired a yoga instructor who ran a photography business and recruited instructors to model in exchange for images. None of us knew what we were doing. Some of those photos are still the most creative work anyone has ever made with my jewelry.
Here's what "serious" meant. Flourish & Thrive gave me the real thing: how to cost a piece accurately, down to the finding. That part I needed and I'd teach it to anyone. Every bead, every clasp, every metre of wire went into a spreadsheet. Then I timed myself — how long to make it, how long to pack it, how long to stand at a table and sell it. If you have never watched a creative person do this to their own work, it is a specific kind of painful. You take the part of your life that has no clock on it and you install a clock.
Then there was the other spreadsheet. My wusband built me one to tell me whether I was profitable, and in fairness it was a beautiful piece of work. It charged me for my paper. For the office space inside our own house. For every hour spent designing. It was, in truth, an accurate oil and gas balance sheet.
What it had no line for was almost everything the business actually was.
No line for learning. No line for reinvesting in myself. No line for taking a passion and turning it into a functioning thing that pays. No line for buying a batch of stones I was having custom grown, cut and set — risks I saved years to take, that paid off later or didn't, and either way didn't land inside the month they were spent. No line for trying something and having it fail. No line for putting myself back into the world at all, while being there for the kids first.
And no line whatsoever for the unpaid labour I was balancing the whole business on top of.
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 and I didn't sit down for nine hours. Where I met women who are still on my list today. Where I brought the kids to help, and they grew up around entrepreneurs who are excellent at what they do — artists who had built real businesses out of nothing but their hands and their stubbornness. Where I learned something about how people actually choose jewelry that I could not have learned anywhere else. Where I put every penny straight back into the business — which the formula reads as a loss and I read as the reason I'm still here.
Red. Red. Red.
Eight years of my life, colour-coded by a formula somebody else wrote.
Here is what those years actually contain, stated once, plainly: I sold six figures' worth of jewelry, assembled by my own hands, standing at events all year long, as the primary parent. That is the number. It was never on the sheet.
And that's the whole thing, isn't it. I didn't build the machine that judged me. I imported it. I typed my own numbers into it, at the family computer, and then I took its word over mine — the same way I'd already been taking the word of a number that was never mine, on a scoreboard I never agreed to.
These were the things I was told, and I believed all of them. Always be closing. ABC. If it isn't profitable, it's a hobby.
The formula isn't wrong. Formulas are fine. It just had no cell for a woman standing three deep at a booth finding out what her customers actually reach for, and it never occurred to me that this might be the formula's gap rather than my failure.
I looked at a red cell and let it tell me what those years were worth.
I thought I was on a team working toward the same thing.
My partner was a VP in oil and gas.
I don't know that there's a way for a creative to measure up to that. I'm not sure the two things can even be laid side by side without one of them looking small — and it was never going to measure up to his version of green.
His work took him to the kind of 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 I built a business in what was left over after that — a sentence I only recently learned to say without softening the front half of it.
That's why it grew the way it did. Slowly, then faster. As the kids got more independent I could take bigger events, make bigger commitments, say yes to things that ate a whole weekend. Grow, grow, grow. Always be closing.
And keep in mind when this was. I pitched media every month — every argument for why this piece was the thing that magazine needed this month, written by hand, one editor at a time. I contacted costume designers directly, found lists, joined groups and got my work onto television that way. There was no ChatGPT, no tool. I built the spreadsheets, ran the timings, designed the pieces, then cast the models, booked the photographer and art-directed the shoot.
None of that has a photograph attached to it. There is no picture of me writing the two hundredth pitch email, and if there were I would not have posted it.
Which is how a day that looked like nothing got done was a day where a great deal got done. It just wasn't visible.
Least of all to me.
The hardest part wasn't the hours. It was moving from one-of-a-kind to repeatable design. My brain physically hurt. Making one perfect thing and making a thing you can make again are two different jobs, and nobody warns you that the second one runs on a completely different part of your head.
And it wasn't only my brain. I knew what the switch would cost me.
The women who loved me for the one-of-a-kind work were not going to find what they came for anymore. I knew going in that I would shed customers. Not because I stopped being good — because I stopped making the exact thing they fell for.
There is no cell for that one either.
The sneeze
I injured my back sneezing.
That is the whole story and I have never found a way to tell it that sounds like anything. No fall, no accident, nothing to point at. I sneezed, and after years of working the way I worked, my back was done negotiating.
What followed was ten years of yearly radiofrequency ablations — a month of recovery, then close to a year of being able to function — and a great deal of pain, and a great deal of stubbornness. I kept working events and then coming home and collapsing. I kept trying to get stronger. Both of those were true at the same time for a long while.
And here is the business decision that came out of it, which is the only reason it belongs in this post.
I moved the centre of gravity to my own website.
Not as a growth strategy. As the only version of this business I could run on a bad day. A market needs me standing for nine hours. A website needs me to be able to think, and I could do that from anywhere — including from bed, which is where a lot of this got built.
It turned out to be the best structural decision I ever made. It's why I survived 2020, and it's why the business still works now. I would love to tell you I saw that coming.
What I would not recommend is the part where I did it alone. I built almost all of it by myself, from home, often in pain, with two kids who have never been anything 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 and I'm not going to pretend I did.
Here's the fantasy, and I think most makers have it: you make the thing, and then it magically sells.
That is not how any of this works. I wanted a real business, so I did the unglamorous half. All of it. Myself.
And here's the part I have never said out loud.
I turned the spreadsheet green.
Not big. Not VP money. Steady. Real money, month after month, that I withdrew and moved into our house account. A contributing member. I want that stated plainly, because for years I let a red cell — from a formula that was never mine, on a scoreboard I never agreed to — tell me otherwise.
I did the work. Flourish & Thrive, then Marie Forleo's B-School, then Denise Duffield-Thomas.
I had actual growth plans — a bit of what people would call woo, sure, and underneath it a lot of design.
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, and that view has been the wallpaper of the inside of my head since my twenties.
So from Calgary — landlocked, snowbound, a stay-at-home mom who put her kids first — I designed a tropical resort collection. The traveller was still in there. She had just switched to working from home.
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 knowing the southern focus was right.
I was booked into a Palm Beach wholesale show for April 2020. Booked and paid for — not a plan, not a maybe. Buyers for cruise lines, coastal US, the Caribbean. It would also have been the first time I ever crossed a border to sell.
That was the dream. Not a metaphor for the dream — the literal thing I had been building toward, with a booth number.
Six weeks out, the world shut down. They returned my payment.
2020–2022: The part I have never written about
2020 was curbside pickup, orders hand-delivered across Calgary, and Zoom Easter with my parents. Every market cancelled. I looked at my site, filled the few orders that came in, and did a great deal 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 — the accounts, the following, thirteen years of the only record this business had. I read it as a message from the universe: this is not the right path for you. I got it back months later by refusing to stop asking, and I never said a word about it publicly at the time.
From the outside, that looks like two hundred and twenty-two days of nothing. I've written about that separately, because it deserves its own room and this is not it.
People ask me how I did it. They have asked me for years. Meanwhile I was sitting in the actual chair thinking: what am I doing.
I've never been able to fake-it-till-you-make-it. I'm not built for it. I'm a blurt-it-all-out and regret-not-reeling-it-in-a-bit person, which is a poor fit for a business where you're meant to project.
So when I went quiet, the hack was only part of it.
The rest was a real question I did not know the answer to. Do I keep going. And if I keep going, I already know it needs a new name, and I don't know if I have that in me right now.
The marriage was over. My personal name went with it, which is a lot of paperwork before it is anything else. A rebrand on top of that wasn't something I had a foundation left to rebuild from. 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 there's something bigger I have never written about. The whole thing 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, and for a while I thought: maybe that's gone now.
November 3, 2022 — Spruce Meadows weekend, Signatures Festival of Crafts. 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 reclaimed my maiden name and the business came with me. My new signage arrived mid-event, so I changed the name of the business partway through a trade show, between customers.
I have no idea what, if anything, people thought about it. It was Covid. I was focused on survival and everything was messy.
Mystic Soul isn't a costume I put on after a hard year. It's the most accurate name this business has ever had.
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2023–2026: Coming back on purpose
The rebuild was not graceful and I'm not going to dress it up. There was a stretch where I posted constantly and said almost nothing. Emoji, exclamation marks, seasonal filler. It looked like a brand doing its job. It did not sound like anybody.
What changed is embarrassingly simple. I started writing the posts again.
Not "elevate your mystic soul journey." Actual sentences. Why I reach for labradorite in March. The weekend I sorted my entire studio by colour and my back never forgave me — but it changed how I sell jewelry, because women do not walk up asking for amazonite. They ask for the blue one.
The habit I didn't notice until I read it all back
I have never once had trouble celebrating somebody else.
Scrolling eighteen years of my own posts, the pattern is impossible to miss. I tagged the photographer. Every time. I named the other jewelry makers — the ones I was supposedly competing with, whose owners are genuinely 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 every word of it. I still do. Community over competition isn't a slogan I picked up for a caption — it's just how I think a room should work.
But here's what I can see now that I couldn't see then.
I gave other people the language 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 was worth your money, then sit down to write my own and manage a product photo and an exclamation mark.
That's not humility. I've stopped calling it that.
It's the same borrowed scoreboard in a nicer outfit. If a win only counts when it belongs to someone else, you have found a very generous way to never count anything.
So I'm going to do the thing I've done for other women a hundred times. Once. For the woman at this bench.
Maori and Plumeria earrings. I designed these years ago and I still sell them, which is its own kind of answer to whether any of it worked.
Eighteen years. Three names. Two kids raised alongside it. A hacked account, a divorce, a pandemic, a back that quit — which I did eventually get sorted, 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 the one-of-a-kind go. Eighteen years on I still bring it to every event, because there is a particular face a woman makes when she realizes there is exactly one of something and she is the one holding it.
The bohemian years, on my studio shelves. Bigger, heavier, more carved. I only ever notice these shifts in hindsight — in the middle of one I have no idea it's happening. It starts quietly, with what's inspiring me and what I'm sourcing, and by the time it's obvious on a shelf I've already been somewhere new for a year.
And now it's a feature rather than 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 in order to be a real business turned out to be the thing I could finally offer properly, once I had a business real enough to offer it in.
That's the full circle, and I didn't design it. I just kept going until it closed.
The rest built itself the same way, one honest reason at a time.
Glass & Light is the one I make at my bench, and it is stunning, and it is 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 I want to make the object that holds it.
Spirit Animals is for the part of me that has always been more comfortable with animals than with rooms full of people.
Gemstone Jewelry is the one that makes me laugh. My dad was a science teacher. I swore up and down I would not follow my parents into anything.
And now I think constantly about every roadside rock he pulled over for and I did not get out of the car for. He'd stop for a cut bank and I'd stay in my seat, nine years old and deeply unimpressed.
I've built an entire business out of stopping the car.
The thread
Three names. Jewelry by Andrea. Andrea Kelly Designs. Mystic Soul Jewelry. Two of the three changed because my own name changed, which tells you most of what you need to know about how personal this has always been.
Three logos, one bench. Same soul, new chapter — and thank you for being part of the journey, whichever name you found me under.
What never moved is underneath all three. It's the same thing that made me pick up a 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 does not 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 occasionally disappeared. From the outside those look identical. From in here they were never the same thing for a second.
Six I'd have a hard time letting go of
People ask what my favorite is like it's a trick question. It isn't. The answer just keeps moving — and my favorites surprise me more often than they should, given that I chose all of them.
Right now it's garnet, citrine and emerald together. Deep red, warm gold, green. In eighteen years I have never once reached for that combination, and now I can't stop looking at it. Luxe, opulent, faintly French, and still somehow grounding. Eighteen years in, my own taste can still ambush me.
The garnet and citrine necklace is Shannon's pick too. Eighteen years after she became the first person to model my work, we still reach for the same piece — and you know it's good when both of us have one.
See what else is on the bench →
Which stone is for the chapter you're in right now?
Take the Gemstone Quiz →
Or, if you want to know which animal has been following you around, there's the Spirit Animal Quiz, and the Chakra Quiz if you'd rather start with where you feel it.
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, 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 and the Golden Globes gift lounge, 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.
