Bio

The conception of Vegas Beads took place during the time Tim and I lived in the Seattle WA area. Tim was manager for an upscale apartment complex in downtown Seattle, while I was working in the Cellular Telephone industry. Tim was burned out in his job and with the advent of the Technology Crash fewer people were moving to the area making it increasingly difficult to keep his apartments occupied. At the same time I was getting laid off from my jobs due to the crash.

We decided that the universe was telling us to start a business of our own. We’d always wanted to do it, and the prospects for work there was looking more and more grim. We thought we had the perfect business idea, so we got started researching how to open a Tanning Salon that would be in conjunction with a coffee/snack shop and natural lighting lounge. What could be better in rainy, cloudy, cold Seattle?

Sometime later, I was talking with my sister and she suggested the idea of starting up a small bead store. Knowing that Tim and I dabbled in beading for fun, she suggested that a bead store might be more fun and profitable. Imagine doing something you like to make a living.

So, we started BEAD research, going to all of the bead stores we could find in the Pacific Northwest. We spent every weekend for about 6 months looking at hundreds of bead stores looking for themes, specialties, things that seemed to work, and other things that didn’t work. One thing we realized fairly quickly was that there was an abundance of really nice bead stores in the area. That was when we knew that we needed to concentrate more on Location.

We both were ready to move out of the constant cloudy/rainy weather. Our two choices were Hawaii and Las Vegas. Las Vegas won out because we felt the atmosphere of the city was more in line with the bead industry. It would also give us the opportunity to meet a greater variety of people from all over the world, as well as many of the great locals.

In March of 2004 we were given keys to the store and we were able to begin renovations to the store. That meant repairing walls, knocking out a couple walls, painting, installing slat walls for displays, getting new carpet installed and finally getting inventory on the walls for the May 1, 2004 opening. We were under a lot of pressure to meet that deadline considering all that we had to do, and that we were doing most of it ourselves, but we successfully opened the doors on May 1.

To be CONTINUED:

 

 

 

 

 

Copyright © by VegasBeads.com All Right Reserved.