The pieces that made it on screen
Garnet Moon — The Vampire Diaries · Lily Green Agate — The Vampire Diaries · The Masks We Wear — Bones · Green Agate Earrings — Bones · Zen Drops — Wu Assassins · See all 16 →
Eighteen years. Three business names. Seven screen placements, fourteen magazines, and one very undignified scream in front of the TV.
October 24, 2013. I was sitting on the floor in front of the television. My kids were on the couch behind me, mostly because I'd made them be there.
The episode opened. The camera found her. And there, on Nina Dobrev's neck, was a necklace I had beaded at my kitchen table in Calgary.
I screamed. Not a delicate gasp. A scream.
My kids said, "What are you screaming about?"
Fair question. This is the long answer, including the parts of the "as seen on" business nobody puts in the press release.
First, an admission: I couldn't remember my own placements
Somebody asked me what my jewelry had been on. I got three shows in before I stalled.
Three. Out of eighteen years.
So I did the unhinged thing. I exported my entire Facebook history, every post, every date, every blurry photo since 2010, and read it front to back like it belonged to someone else.
This post came from that export file, not from memory.
What I found in there is why I now log everything I post, for the record rather than the algorithm. The wins don't stay put. You post "SPOTTED!!" on a Tuesday, get one good night of it, and then it dissolves. Two years later you can't name it. Five years later you're not sure it happened.
Without the archive, eighteen years shrinks down to a vague feeling that I'd been busy.
(The archive turned into its own rabbit hole: what sixteen years of your own posts reveal about you. That one's here: 18 Years, Three Names, One Thread.)
Everything below is dated, named, and sourced from something I wrote down at the time.
It started with "Yipee!"
Before the television and the magazines, there was a short write-up in the Calgary Neighbours newspaper.
January 27, 2011. A local paper doing a small piece on a stay-at-home mom running an online business. That was me.
What I wrote that day: "First time my business has made it into print. Yipee!"
That was the whole entry, and I don't even remember it now.
Bead Trends, and a coincidence I still can't get over
Somewhere in there I was at a women's event in Calgary and met a jewelry vendor who had been published in Bead Trends magazine.
I was in awe. That's a real thing a person can do?
So I bought the magazine, sat down to figure out how you submit, and submitted.
September 2011: seven of my pieces accepted, across three issues: November, December, and the following February. I announced it with a very composed "looking forward to seeing my work in print," which is not remotely what I was feeling.
December's issue carried three of them: Tribal Blues, and the Glamour Squared necklace and earring set. "Ancient Wonders" ran in February 2012. One-of-a-kind pieces, photographed beautifully, printed on paper I could hold in my hands.
Walking into Indigo, finding that month's issue on the shelf and flipping to my own pieces, I wanted to grab every person in that aisle by the arm. Look at this. I made that. It's in print.
This part still makes me laugh.
The woman who inspired me lives in my neighbourhood. Years later my daughter started dating her son. Years after that, they're still together.
Eighteen years in, the business and the life stopped being separate things a long time ago.
Garnet Moon
Back to the floor in front of the television.
When the opportunity for The Vampire Diaries came up, I hadn't watched a single episode. So I binge-watched every one I could get my hands on, partly homework, partly because I got completely swept in. (Team Damon. I'm not sorry.)
Then I sat down to work out what a vampire would wear. I had my assistants with me, both around seven to nine years old, both with strong opinions about everything on the bead tray.
I'd just received a shipment of fair-trade moon pendants. I started beading them with garnet.
That's how the Garnet Moon Necklace was born. A design that exists because of a show I'd never seen and two kids editing my work.
Season 5, Episode 4, "For Whom the Bell Tolls." Nina Dobrev as Elena on The CW.
About the money, since you're probably wondering. The show's wardrobe stylist, Leigh Leverett, found my work in a gifting round through The Artisan Group. I paid for the round, not the placement. Someone still had to open that bag, remember it, and choose my necklace over everything else on the table when the moment came.
That production was generous with information. They told us it had been used, and the necklace was visible in the episode previews, so I knew in advance I was going to get to see it.
Hence: floor, television, scream, confused children.
It was on screen for a good part of the episode. The next morning I posted "So very happy right now," the most restrained sentence I have ever written. Within a month I couldn't bead them fast enough.
I still haven't gotten tired of that feeling.
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Now the part that isn't glamorous
January 2014. My Elegant earrings went into the swag bags at the invite-only GBK Golden Globes Gift Lounge, the awards-season bags you see photographed on red carpets, handed to famous people who look delighted.
It sounded impossibly fancy. I said yes immediately.
Then I learned how it works: the businesses "gifting" the products pay to be in that bag. Every one of them is buying a seat.
It was still cool. Four days later Cosmopolitan ran a giveaway for one of those bags. That put me, the Golden Globes and Cosmo in a legit sentence together. I watched the coverage like a hawk afterward, scanning every photo to see who was holding what.
I don't remember ever spotting them on anyone.
The Elegant series, the design that went into the Golden Globes bags.
I'm telling you this because "as seen on" is a phrase most brands hide behind, and I'd rather explain the machinery.
It’s a real credential. It’s also a business with a price list.
The Artisan Group, and the woman who built it
I joined The Artisan Group in 2013, and that's where most of my screen placements came from, including the very first one a few months later.
It's the creation of a woman named Valerie, and it isn't a hobby she runs on the side. She has other businesses. She built this one because nothing like it existed: a collective of independent artisans, wired directly into the people who decide what goes on an actor.
Stylists. Costume designers. Celebrity gifting. The awards-season gift lounges. Rooms a woman at a bead table in Calgary has no route into on her own, and Valerie's whole business is being the route.
It is a whole fantabulous world, and I had no idea it existed until I was standing in it.
I had one thing wrong in my head for years, and I think most people get it wrong from the outside.
Valerie provides the opportunity. She does not hand out placements. What you get is the right to pitch.
You're pitching against sometimes hundreds of other designs, all beautiful, all made by a woman who wants it exactly as much as you do.
Some of those women are very good at this. They read the brief, know the character, send exactly the right thing at the right moment, and get placements galore, round after round. They earned every one.
I was a baby.
I got better. But for the first several rounds I was submitting pretty things with no real idea who was going to wear them or why. It was the same mistake I was making in my magazine pitches at the time, and it took me years to connect the two.
Then I shipped. Sometimes in a few weeks, sometimes in a few days, always faster than felt reasonable. TAG assembled the bags for the stylists. After that it was out of everybody's hands.
A stylist gift bag is a season's worth of options. Your piece goes into a wardrobe department and sits there as a candidate, episode after episode, for months. Some stylists were wonderful about it and would tell us episode by episode what had been pulled. You could plan. You could watch. You could tell your mother.
Most of the time you found out the way I found out about half of mine. I'd open Facebook, see I'd been tagged by The Artisan Group, and be instantly, ridiculously delirious in my own kitchen.
Getting chosen wasn’t the hard part. Delivering once you were chosen was.
Almost every show needs duplicates. Continuity doesn't care that you make one-of-a-kind. The call would come and they'd need a second one, overnighted or inside a couple of days. If you couldn't get it there in time, they simply wouldn't use the piece. You'd been picked, and it evaporated inside a shipping window.
I lost pieces that way. So eventually I stopped waiting to be asked and started sending the duplicate in the first place. Double the materials, double the hours, double the risk that none of it comes back. But if the call came, I was already there.
In the years I got the most placements, I was still making one-of-a-kind pieces. A duplicate was really a second original, and half the time I couldn't source the same stone twice.
That's what pushed me toward designs I could reproduce. Not a business plan, a shipping deadline I kept losing to. It made me sit down and work out what a Mystic Soul piece is: the symbols, the stones, the shapes I'd want to make again and again. It's the reason this shop exists in the form it does, instead of as a rotating pile of things you'll never see twice.
Hollywood didn’t make me famous. It made me repeatable, and that’s been worth more.
Pieces also surface years later. Wardrobe departments trade and borrow and hold onto things, and a design can float around Los Angeles for a decade before somebody clips it on.
That's how a Tree of Life necklace of mine turned up years later on a contestant on The $100,000 Pyramid. I've been hunting that clip ever since and haven't found it. If you have it, I would love a word.
What I wrote about TAG at the time: "Collaboration over competition." I still mean it. It's an interesting business full of good artists.
It made dreams come true I hadn’t been organized enough to dream yet.
From a home studio in Calgary, in my pajamas, with a rescue dog underfoot, this was a very strange and wonderful way to rub elbows.
Bones: pinch me, and the mask
November 5, 2015. The mask went first. Season 11, episode 6, "The Senator in the Street Sweeper," on FOX.
"The Masks We Wear" is the piece I knew was meant for that show. A tribal mask with smoky quartz. The mask is mischievous: it shifts and turns as you move, so it never sits quite the same way twice.
Emily Deschanel wore it in the opening scene, and the mask did exactly what the mask does. It kept moving, the whole way through. It felt like a private little communication between us.
"The Masks We Wear" — Season 11, Episode 6, "The Senator in the Street Sweeper," FOX.
Sometimes the universe reads your notes.
December 10, 2015. Five weeks later, in "The Doom in the Boom" (season 11, episode 10, the two-hour fall finale), Emily Deschanel wore my green agate earrings on the same show.
What I posted, in its entirety: "Pinch me!!!"
The green agate earrings. They still sell out.
That one I caught. Plenty I didn't. The less cinematic version of this life is watching episode after episode, studying wardrobe, finding nothing, and then stumbling across your own work in a rerun months later because you weren't watching the right night.
It's a numbers game and the numbers are not flattering.
Hold on to those earrings, though. They come back.
Back to Mystic Falls, and the necklace named Lily
January 29, 2016. The Vampire Diaries came back for a second one.
A green agate design, worn by Annie Wersching as Lily Salvatore in "Hell Is Other People," season 7, episode 10, on The CW. That's why it's still called the Lily Green Agate Necklace. I named it after the character who wore it. I do that.
The Lily Green Agate Necklace, named for Lily Salvatore, who wore it.
My favourite detail: there's a matching necklace and earring set, and the earrings in it are the same green agate drops that turned up on Bones.
The only set I’ve ever made where each half was seen on a different network. The necklace on The CW. The earrings on FOX.
Three placements in three months, two shows, two networks. That season was ridiculous, and I had to read my own archive to remember it happened that way.
May 2017. Then Rachna Khatau wore my Good Luck Crystal Horseshoe on Baby Daddy. A luck charm, on a sitcom, which feels about right.
The magazine years
Somewhere in the middle of all this I signed up for Andreea Ayers' media placement program. Another small-business woman, running curated contact lists and telling you what to pitch and when.
And then I pitched. And pitched. And pitched.
I would never have thought of media pitching on my own. It's a whole discipline, and it runs on a calendar with no relationship to reality:
- Media works months ahead of television. Print works months ahead of that.
- It would be spring, and I would be pitching magazines on Christmas colour combinations with absolutely no clue what would be hot by December.
- Nobody wants "here is my necklace." What does the necklace do? What moment is it for? Who is she, and why does she need it in the December issue?
Pitch the story, not the product.
That last one changed how I write about every piece I make, including the ones on this site right now.
Going back through the archive to write this, I'd forgotten how many landed:
- Equanimity, spring 2015 — Garnet Moon, in "Fashion Accessories for Spring"
- Boca Life, summer 2015 — the Peace & Balance Amethyst Mudra Bracelet
- YogiApproved, February 2016 — the Crystal Angel Heart in their Valentine's guide; a Buddha Bangle giveaway that October
- MASSAGE Magazine, August 2016
- Ottawa Life, September 2016 — Editors' Best Picks
- Celebrity Page, December 2016 — the Aria earrings in the Holiday Gift Guide. I remember thinking: Barnes & Noble, here we come
- DAYSPA, December 2016 — the Mala Kits
- InStore, April 2017 — the Mala Kits again
- Halfstack, February 2018 — the Labradorite Prayer Mala Kit
Four of those I did not remember at all until I read them back.
And then Vogue
June 14, 2018. British Vogue. The Capri Dafni Earrings.
It came in as a last-minute need from an editor, which is often how it happens: months of pitching into silence, then one email with a deadline measured in hours. One clean, high-resolution image on a white background, sent inside the hour, and you're in. Chance favours the prepared.
My entire post that day was four words. "AS SEEN IN @britishvogue." Then I went back to work.
Wu Assassins: the one where they came to me
This is the one I still can't quite believe.
Wu Assassins was the first show where I worked directly with the costume team. No gift bag, no bought spot. A real conversation, and then a box of sixteen designs going out the door.
By then I knew the duplicate rule, so sixteen designs was never sixteen pieces. Every design was made more than once, at my bench, on a costume department's timeline instead of mine.
I have never worked that hard on a deadline in my life. I would do it again tomorrow.
They used them. August 2019: Li Jun Li, playing Jenny, wearing my work on Netflix. I was only partway through the season before I'd counted six of my own pieces on screen, including the brushed metal drops and the Third Eye Pavé Necklace.
The Zen Drops, one of the sixteen.
Sixteen designs sent from a house in Calgary. Six of them on a Netflix series. Nobody bought a seat for that one.
Why I stopped
I eventually stopped submitting jewelry to shows.
Not because getting a placement wasn't amazing. It was, and one can be a game changer. But every submission was also a business expense: the product, the express shipping, and most of all, the time.
These days I put my time and energy into blogging, learning and creating. This post is part of that.
I've thought about reviving my pitching skills. These days I'm okay looking back on them as my foundation, and knowing I always carry them with me.
Three names
Most of these placements were earned under Jewelry by Andrea. Then under Andrea Kelly Designs.
The last change was a divorce necessity. Mystic Soul Jewelry is the real me, and I am never changing names again.
The whole eighteen years, the markets, the spreadsheets, the year it nearly ended, and all three names, is in 18 Years, Three Names, One Thread.
Three names is also exactly why the archive matters.
A placement earned under a name you no longer use quietly stops belonging to you, unless you wrote it down.
Through every version, the placements were what gave me credibility. Saying "I own a jewelry business" is one thing. Saying "some of it's been on television" makes people tilt their head and go, wait, show me what got on TV.
Eighteen years later it still does that. It's still not what I lead with.
The irony: these pieces sell steadily online and I rarely bring them to markets with me.
So what did it all amount to?
I have not retired off the funds.
Reading sixteen years of my own posts in one sitting, I noticed something. I would get the result, the placement, the actual dream, and be immediately on to "what's next." In my head I'd already be thinking: but I didn't get the other one. There's a bigger one out there, and that's the one that changes everything. Then on to the next pitch.
I posted "SPOTTED!" and moved on the same week, every time. I'd forgotten Boca Life. Forgotten Ottawa Life. Forgotten DAYSPA entirely.
Living it one week at a time is a completely different experience from reading it all at once. What I see now is tenacity. A woman with young kids at a bead table in Calgary who bought the magazine and figured out how to submit, joined the collective, signed up for the pitching program, and kept sending boxes into the void.
What it amounted to, in plain terms:
- A design I still sell constantly. Garnet Moon exists because of a show I'd never watched, and it's been a best seller for over a decade.
- A way of writing about jewelry. Pitching taught me to lead with the moment, not the materials. Everything on this site is written that way.
- A credential nobody can take back. Three business names later, the screen credits still travel with me.
- A reason to keep records. Every post I make now gets logged, dated, tagged and filed, so that in ten years the wins are still mine to name.
- Proof, for anyone who needs it, myself top of list, that this is real jewelry made by a real person who has been at it a very long time.
And one more, which I didn't expect: it makes me proud now in a way it didn't then. Younger me was too busy chasing the next one to enjoy any of it.
I'll take it.
Every placement, in one list
Screen
- The Vampire Diaries — Oct 24, 2013 · Season 5 Ep 4, "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (The CW). Garnet Moon Necklace, worn by Nina Dobrev as Elena
- Bones — Nov 5, 2015 · Season 11 Ep 6, "The Senator in the Street Sweeper" (FOX). "The Masks We Wear", worn by Emily Deschanel
- Bones — Dec 10, 2015 · Season 11 Ep 10, "The Doom in the Boom," the two-hour fall finale (FOX). Green Agate Drop Earrings, worn by Emily Deschanel
- The Vampire Diaries — Jan 29, 2016 · Season 7 Ep 10, "Hell Is Other People" (The CW). Lily Green Agate Necklace, worn by Annie Wersching as Lily Salvatore · also sold as a necklace and earring set, whose earrings are the pair seen on Bones
- Baby Daddy — May 2017. Good Luck Crystal Horseshoe, worn by Rachna Khatau
- Wu Assassins (Netflix) — August 2019 · Season 1. Li Jun Li as Jenny. Sixteen designs, six on screen — Zen Drops, Third Eye Pavé Necklace, Dusk Cleo Drops among them
- The $100,000 Pyramid — year unconfirmed. A Tree of Life necklace, worn by a contestant. Still hunting the clip — if you find it, tell me
Print & editorial
- Calgary Neighbours — Jan 2011 · the first one ever
- Bead Trends Magazine — Nov 2011, Dec 2011 (Tribal Blues · Glamour Squared set), Feb 2012 ("Ancient Wonders") · seven pieces across three issues
- Cosmopolitan — Jan 2014 · Golden Globes swag bag giveaway
- Equanimity Magazine — spring 2015 · Garnet Moon
- Boca Life Magazine — summer 2015 · Amethyst Mudra Bracelet
- YogiApproved — Feb 2016 · Oct 2016
- MASSAGE Magazine — Aug 2016
- Ottawa Life Magazine — Sept 2016 · Editors' Best Picks
- Celebrity Page — Dec 2016 · Aria Earrings
- DAYSPA Magazine — Dec 2016 · Mala Kits
- InStore Magazine — April 2017 · Mala Kits
- Halfstack Magazine — Feb 2018 · Labradorite Prayer Mala Kit
- The Artisan Group Valentine's Guide — Feb 2018 · Amethyst Chakra Crystal
- British Vogue — June 2018 · Capri Dafni Earrings
Gifting suites & collectives
- GBK Golden Globes Gift Lounge — January 2014 · the Elegant series, in the invite-only swag bags
- The Artisan Group — member since 2013 · the source of most screen placements, including the first
Shop the As Seen On collection
If you take one thing from this
Not every dream arrives with a marching band. Some arrive months late, in a rerun, while you're half-watching with a cup of tea. Some arrive as four words you type on your phone and then forget for eight years.
Send the thing. Pitch the thing. Buy the spot if the spot is worth it. Then let it go, because the timeline was never yours to control. Check back in eighteen years, when you can finally see the shape of it.
And write it down. I lost track of my own career inside my own life, and the only reason I got it back is an export file.
Keep the receipts. Memory won’t.
And when you get the placement, own it. I have spent years undermining my own wins on the way out of my mouth: I was part of a group. It was a list, not a feature. It was a fluke. Nothing recent. Every one of those hands the thing back. Don't.
If you want to find the piece that fits the chapter you're in right now, the Gemstone Quiz takes 60 seconds, or try the Chakra Quiz if you'd rather come at it from energy than stone.
Eighteen years of this, and the best part is still the people who stayed for it. The Circle is my list: 15% off your first order, and a crystal reading from me on your birthday.
Keep Reading
- 18 Years, Three Names, One Thread — the whole story, start to now
- The Complete Crystal Guide: where to start
- How to layer crystal jewelry with intention (without it looking like a pile-up)
- The crystal care guide — keeping stone jewelry looking new
- Best sellers — including the Garnet Moon
Questions I get asked about this
Q: Did celebrities actually wear your jewelry, or was it just gifted?
Both, depending on the placement. The Bones, Vampire Diaries, Baby Daddy and Wu Assassins pieces were worn on screen by the actors in those episodes. Gift lounge pieces were given to attendees, and whether any given person wore theirs afterward is anyone's guess.
Q: How does a small jewelry business get on television?
Three routes, in my experience. Artisan collectives like The Artisan Group, which maintain the relationships with stylists and costume designers and open up rounds you can pitch into. You buy in, then you compete on the work against everyone else who bought in. Paid gifting suites during awards season, which is a straight purchase. And direct contact: pitching publications and productions yourself, which is slow, mostly silence, and occasionally extraordinary. Wu Assassins came from the third one.
Q: Do productions need more than one of the same piece?
Yes, and it surprised me too. If a design is going to be worn on screen they want duplicates: continuity, doubles, the ordinary reality that things get lost or damaged mid-shoot. For Wu Assassins that meant making every design more than once, fast, to their calendar.
Q: Do you still submit to shows?
Not anymore. A placement is amazing and can be a game changer, but every submission cost product, express shipping and, most of all, time. These days that time goes into blogging, learning and creating.
Q: Can I buy the exact pieces that were on screen?
Yes. Everything in the As Seen On collection is either the original design or made the same way it was then. The Garnet Moon is the same necklace, still garnet, still a fair-trade moon pendant.
Q: Is anything of yours on two different shows?
The Lily Green Agate set. The necklace was worn on The Vampire Diaries; the matching earrings were worn on Bones. Two shows, two networks, one set.
Q: Why are some placements under a different business name?
I've operated as Jewelry by Andrea and as Andrea Kelly Designs before Mystic Soul Jewelry. Same designer, same bench, same hands. And the last name change is the last one.
Q: Do gift lounge placements cost money?
Yes. Brands pay to be included in the bags. It's a legitimate marketing channel and it's also a purchase, and I think it's more useful to say that plainly than to let people assume otherwise.
Q: Which placement meant the most?
The Garnet Moon, and it isn't close. First one, a design that only exists because of it, and the only one where I got to sit on the floor and scream in front of my children.
— Andrea 🌙
