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Buried Diamond

By Caitlin Petreycik
  • "Basically, I make a product for a month. I'll post a few work-in-progress shots, and then I give a date and time and say 'this is when everything I’ve been showing you is going up for sale.' Usually everything sells out in like two hours."
  • "I’m surprised by the range of people who buy Buried Diamond, who wear it. Sometimes it’s an older woman who loves chunky jewelry and dresses sort of minimally otherwise. Other times it's a teenager."
  • "These hand earrings were on Buzzfeed. Do you know that cartoon Doug? They said these looked like something that Judy would wear, that girl with the beret. What a compliment!"
  • "I definitely think that my customer likes the fact that the pieces are handmade and I think she likes the sort of wonkiness of them—they’re not symmetrical."
  • "A lot of the charms start as illustrations—sort of doodly-drawing. I guess I’m the kind of person who, if I'm going to sit down and do a drawing, like a purse, I’ll draw 18 of them. I kind of like to make little inventories like that, and then those thin
  • "If I’m forming all the blank clay pieces, I usually spend a couple of days just doing that. And then I’ll cycle through painting them, and a lot of them require several layers. So you have to have all these stages. That’s the most time-consuming part. Th
  • "People stop me on the street, on the subway, people try to touch my jewelry a lot. I’ve unfortunately gotten used to it, but people always want to talk to you when you’re wearing a lot of big jewelry. I’m surprised by how often I’ll give a business card
  • "A lot of the stuff I made in the beginning was, like, neon shoelaces and quartz crystals and semiprecious stones. It doesn’t look like the jewelry I make now, but I think the same person would wear it."
  • "Some of the people that I met when I first started using Tumblr are people I still communicate with today. I send a few of those girls Halloween jewelry every year. You meet people who are really like-minded that you wouldn’t have met otherwise, and I th
  • "Lena Dunham bought one of my magic eye necklaces, which have always been my most popular pieces. And she Instagrammed it a few times, and that was awesome. She’s so sweet. That was definitely a big moment."
  • "I’m kind of casually working all the time. Like, I wake up in the morning and I do a little bit of work, and then I’ll leave the house and go for a long walk and then I’ll come back. And if it’s something really mindless, sometimes I’ll listen to a podca
  • "Stationery-type things start at $6. And then the average single charm is $24. Sometimes I do full necklaces and those are around $300, but it depends on how many charms are on them. And then a single charm on a necklace is around $30."
  • "I think that the Instagram community really likes to learn how things are made, and to see that sort of story. So after I got Instagram that was really when things started to take off, probably in the past two, two and a half years. The orders just kept

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