While working her full-time job, Christin Castagne woke up at 4 o’clock in the morning to teach herself metalsmithing. She wanted to follow her passion of creating jewelry, a passion deeply rooted in an appreciation for art and what eventually became the philosophy behind her jewelry business, Hot Rocks by Christin.
“It’s more the joy of doing it, it’s not so much the gain financially, but the joy of making it as an artist,” says Castagne. “It’s the joy of pursuing something that I value.”
All of Castagne’s designs start with a unique gemstone.
Gemstones from all around the world are mined daily. According to “National Geographic,” there are more than 4,000 different types of gems, jewels and crystals. Specifically in Indonesia, jasper, a stone that can look completely different each time it is mined, is a hot commodity and has been found in almost every color known to man. In addition, jasper stones can have stripes, dots and other patterns with the presence of sulfur or other elements.
Many of Castagne’s pieces contain these different styles of jasper, a stone that has become her personal favorite and a crowd pleaser. Castagne finds a stone she wants to use and creates a design for the setting of the piece. Her jewelry mostly consists of necklaces, earrings and rings. Working with unique gemstones has been the center of Castagne’s business for the past eight years.
“What nature can put together and be so beautiful, it’s fascinating,” Castagne says.
Unique Hot Rocks jewelry piece
Castagne says her customers see different things in her stones and feel connected to them in certain ways. She thinks people draw from personal experiences or from experiences in nature to relate to and enjoy the stones. This motivates Castagne to create one-of-a-kind pieces.
“When you look at it, one person sees one thing and another person sees another thing,” Cassagne says. “It’s fun when I talk to people and I show them the stones and they tell me what they think it is.”
Along with making her pieces to sell through Etsy and on Instagram, Castagne often works with customers to create personalized jewelry. She shows them the stone and sketches a design for the setting, which is usually made from sterling silver or another metal. From there, she works with the customer on any changes to create what they want. She even sends customers process photos while she’s making the piece.
“These things are unique and I’m not a production artist,” Castagne says. “Because of the stones that I use, my work is more personal.”
Castagne hopes to feature Hot Rocks by Christin in galleries throughout Raleigh within the next year. As her work is personal, unique and laborious to create, Castagne hopes her jewelry will be received, displayed and sold like pieces of art.
Raleigh designer Anna Cate Fleming of Anna Cate Collection
Picture your wardrobe. How much of it do you wear on rotation and how much mostly just hangs?
Studies show that, on average, most of us have closets comprised of 20 percent “go-to” pieces that we wear on a day-to-day basis, while the rest is just extra. It’s that extra that Raleigh designer Anna Cate Fleming wants to transform into the everyday, and her brand, Anna Cate Collection, embraces the challenge of creating those precise go-to clothes.
“I want the clothes to be worn year-round, it doesn’t have to be season-specific,” Fleming says of her clothing line. “We try to encourage sustainability in the wardrobe.”
Anna Cate Collection launched a little over two years ago via wholesale, meaning Fleming sold to different stores around North Carolina to begin with. Now, her clothes are for sale online and in 300 stores along the East Coast and across the Midwest.
Fleming’s body-positive clothes are designed to look good on all different shapes and sizes but the brand didn’t start out that way. When Fleming first started dabbling in designing clothes, she took art that she created and incorporated it into clothes her husband would wear, planning eventually to use her artwork to create a menswear line. But Fleming realized quickly that she knew much more about women’s clothes and decided to start a women’s line instead, with the help of her sister, Holly Dickens Boyd, who is a Raleigh fashion blogger.
When her collection initially launched, Fleming noticed that when people of all sizes tried on her clothes, they usually had a comment to make about how their body looked. This inspired her to make timeless pieces that spoke to a combination of silhouettes and made all women feel confident wearing the clothes.
“We want to cater to the girl who doesn’t love how her arms look all the time, but wants to feel attractive in the clothes,” Fleming says. “We want it to be easy and timeless but still current. We want it to be a staple.”
Now, the brand is focused on solid-colored pieces to be worn more often. Instead of artsy prints and patterns as the muse, Fleming uses sculptures and shapes to influence her clothing designs. For each piece, she uses similar fabrics that are soft, weighty and can be molded and crafted to the shape that Fleming envisions as she updates her styles season by season.
The past month has been Fleming’s most successful so far in terms of online sales and wholesale and Fleming has even brought back a popular piece—the Mackenzie dress—that was a long-standing best-seller and had been discontinued. The Nina top is another best-seller, and one that Fleming says every woman should have in her closet.
“The little celebratory moments that keep happening are the most rewarding and humbling in this process,” Fleming says. “We’ve gotten good feedback from across the country and now I feel like we finally understand what our girl wants, what our niche is and what products are going to keep being successful.”
Follow Anna Cate Collection on Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest and shop at annacatecollection.com.
At 16, most of us are excited about getting our driver’s licenses and making plans for after high school. But Ravenscroft High School student Arica Scott has bigger things on her mind—namely, the launch of her second collection of lip glosses for her business, So Glossy.
At 15, Scott started making her own lip glosses and decided to sell them to girls like her who wanted a product that would feel good to apply and that would wear well throughout the day.
“My main thing was on the feeling,” Scott says. Lip gloss should feel thick, but not too thick, glossy but not too sticky, weightless, and, if it was a glitter look, she wanted none of that gritty glitter texture. The launch of a matte collection last month brought seven more lip gloss colors and styles to Scott’s So Glossy online catalog.
At first, Scott hoped to make and test all her own products herself. But, she found, balancing her sophomore and junior years of high school—the hardest years, she says—meant it was best for her to use a manufacturer.
Now, a manufacturer sends Scott different formulas for the lip glosses, each taking about a month to perfect. Then, after Scott tests and approves them, she starts sourcing colors for the collection. For both her first collection and the new matte one, Scott says she went through at least seven different formulas. Next, Scott chooses her lip gloss names around an overall theme. Her first collection contained five glosses, including #Goals, Icy Girl and Mad Hater. The Matte collection has seven glosses, including Barbie Tingz, Bad and Boujee, and Dreamville.
“The first collection’s overall theme was things I wanted my brand to be like,” Scott says. “This collection is songs.”
Throughout the process, Scott promotes her products on social media. Her mother helps her from time to time with the business side of things, and most of So Glossy’s sales come from social media, word of mouth and occasional pop-up events. Scott personally packages all orders using pink bubble wrap and she includes small gifts, such as stickers, with purchases. If you order two glosses, you get a So Glossy mirror.
So Glossy’s success has taught Scott how to evolve a brand. “You have to constantly think about ways you can keep promoting your product,” she says. “Sometimes you just have to do things out of your comfort zone because sometimes those are the things that work and take you further in life.”
Scott says her pre-college business world exposure is a step ahead for her future. “This was a good thing to do at my age,” Scott says. “I get to motivate people, especially girls. A lot of people think you can’t handle it at this age. But you can.”
Sophie Wiseman-Floyd was living in Haiti in 2010 when a 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck, plunging the Caribbean country of about 5 million people into utter distress. Wiseman-Floyd, 17 years old at the time, returned home to the United States to finish high school. But she couldn’t help but feel that she had missed out on something.
“It was a really cool experience for [my family] to be exposed to a developmental world culture,” Wiseman-Floyd says. “And then, the earthquake happened. There was just something missing. I needed to figure out what I wanted to do, so I decided to move back and take a gap year in Haiti.”
It was a decision that set her on her current path to making jewelry. In Haiti, a company hired Wiseman-Floyd and 300 artisans to make jewelry for $5 a day, triple the minimum wage in the island nation. Wiseman-Floyd soon decided to strike out on her own and started a business, Haiti Jewels, where she taught local women to make jewelry to be sold in U.S. and European markets.
“Those three years [in Haiti] switched me from thinking about a public health career to design,” Wiseman-Floyd recalls.
In 2013, she headed back to the U.S. once again, to major in industrial design at N.C. State. She knew right away that she wanted to start her own jewelry business stateside, but it wasn’t until her senior year that her business, Heir, became a reality. Wiseman-Floyd began curating jewelry from gold and brass instead of the recycled products she used in Haiti. She also launched a website to sell her creations and began showing and selling her work at pop-up markets.
Last May, on the week of graduation, Wiseman-Floyd got a call from the boutique Bevello—the store wanted to carry her jewelry in its North Carolina locations.
“I did a million happy dances in my room. It was unbelievable,” Wiseman-Floyd says.
Now, Heir jewelry is sold in seven different stores around Raleigh. As for her “workshop,” Wiseman-Floyd currently makes all of her jewelry, by herself, out of her home.
“I use my dining room table for production mode,” she says. “It’s my favorite part of the day when I get to sit down and actually make the orders.”
Wiseman-Floyd recently made a spur-of-the-moment leap into the Knoxville market during a visit to the area over Thanksgiving last year. She packed every piece that she had, and wound up selling out, even landing a contract with a store in the area to sell her jewelry. The expansion, she hopes, will help grow her business and branch out to even more markets. She has a five-year plan to hire more employees, and is considering working with women who have arrest records or who just need help starting over with their professional careers.
Heir products are unique in their simplicity. Necklaces, earrings and cuffs are the most in-demand items and Floyd says her jewelry allows the fine details on her pieces to make the biggest statements. Connecting with her clients, Wiseman-Floyd says, is key.
“You don’t have to be loud to be heard,” Wiseman-Floyd says of her pieces. “Even as we grow, I want to be connecting personally with our clients. I love watching women try on my jewelry for the first time and seeing their faces light up. I love having clients reach out and ask for a creation.”
As her company grows, Wiseman-Floyd hopes to hold on to that personal touch. She says she views Heir as a guild and doesn’t envision her jewelry ever being mass produced.
“I get so happy, almost to the point of tears, when people choose to buy the jewelry that I make versus something that is manufactured elsewhere [on a large scale],” Wiseman-Floyd says. “When people seek out our craft, it’s the biggest compliment in the world. It makes my heart feel like it’s growing too big to fit inside of my chest.”
Shop HEIR custom pieces as well as staples at heir-raleigh.com or on Instagram @heir.raleigh.
Copper is a natural metal found in rocks and the Earth’s crust, but it’s also found in our own bodies and is an essential mineral to human health. Studies have shown that, when extra copper is absorbed through the skin, it may help the growth and reproduction of healthy joints. Armed with this knowledge, Lou Horton started a business creating copper art jewelry, a hobby that turned into art that turned into work that would become her lifelong path.
As Horton was starting her business, Lou Horton Sculpture, and selling her jewelry online and at pop-up markets, Horton’s aunt asked for a copper cuff bracelet to help her carpal tunnel syndrome. The request coincided with Horton’s decision to quit the life of working a full-time job and creating art on the side to transitioning to working as a full-time artist and creating her own jewelry.
“I make things, I make the same things over and over and am happiest when I’m producing inventory,” Horton says. “I had run out of excuses, there was nothing else I needed to start my own art business.” Through her website, Etsy page and pop-up shops, Horton’s business started booming—her jewelry spoke for itself. Everything that Horton creates and sells is copper-based and wearable.
The things that most people would lose patience over, Horton enjoys, she says.
“I love that I can fit my entire booth and all my products in my small car. I love buying holiday decorations and props for my booth. I love having my own little store for a day.”
Horton says her favorite way to sell is at pop-up markets and fairs, especially if the event requires a costume. Being passionate about her work is one thing she has found critical in influencing her success. And it’s not only her own passion, but also that of the people around her, and their passion for art, that has motivated her to get to where she is now. By connecting to the local art community, Horton was able to break away from her usual introverted tendencies to introduce herself to other artists and to the people that would appreciate her work and persuade her to sell.
Horton makes her creations in a shared studio space downtown. This way, she also has access to people and places that help influence her work. “I imagine the end user of my jewelry and how he or she would wear it, what events and social functions they might wear it to, and how it will make them feel when they wear it,” Horton says.
All of her jewelry is stamped with her name and is made of copper that Horton personally thinks is beautiful. She encourages people viewing her art to remember that copper is the only orange metal, which makes it unique. Within the copper are black, brown, red, blue and green undertones. Horton then hammers and molds the copper into wearable art.
Her most popular design is a cuff available for men and women called the Zinger, a thin, flat wire cuff with design stamps. The second most popular seller is the Fern Cuff, which is ruffled to look like what Horton describes as sea grass.
Lou Horton Sculpture embodies Horton’s passion in every piece that’s made. The jewelry is more art than accessory, and the artist is more motivated by creativity than by sales and profits.
“I want to make things that people truly love,” she says. “I didn’t want to make anything that would clutter up people’s homes, or sit around getting dusty. For a long time, I resisted becoming a full-time artist because I worried that nobody needed art. But this isn’t true. People have made art since before we developed farming, or cities, or civilization as we know it. Sometimes the only things we have of a lost civilization is the jewelry and artifacts they buried with their dead. Jewelry is incredibly personal and meaningful to the wearer. People just need art and adornments in their lives.”
At first, Scott hoped to make and test all her own products herself. But, she found, balancing her sophomore and junior years of high school—the hardest years, she says—meant it was best for her to use a manufacturer.
As Horton was starting her business, Lou Horton Sculpture, and selling her jewelry online and at pop-up markets, Horton’s aunt asked for a copper cuff bracelet to help her carpal tunnel syndrome. The request coincided with Horton’s decision to quit the life of working a full-time job and creating art on the side to transitioning to working as a full-time artist and creating her own jewelry.