SU student creates works of art with handmade jewelry business
SU student creates handmade jewelry business
Amanda Kruman is somewhat of an accidental entrepreneur. She creates and sells handcrafted jewelry on her Instagram page @fullywyred by wiring together vibrant geodes into bracelets and rings, dotting crystals with stones and rocks to create car charms and fashioning intricate pearl and bead body chains for her loyal audience of 2,200 plus Instagram followers. She released her first full-fledged Instagram ad campaign a month ago, and most recently sold her products in person at Popcycle’s pop-up shop for Syracuse University student brands last Thursday.
But the junior political science major said she never meant to start a business in the first place.
“The reason why this all came about in the first place is totally unintentional. I never in a million years thought that I’d do this,” Kruman said.
Kruman spent her winter break of sophomore year in quarantine with her parents. “Everybody was trying to pick a different craft and things to do, and I stumbled across a TikTok where somebody was making a wired ring, and I thought, ‘I have the materials to do this.’”
Kruman’s parents ran a jewelry business themselves, and gave Kruman full leeway to use their leftover stock of stones and rocks from countries like Mexico and Brazil to experiment with.
So she made her first ring.
“The first couple were not cute,” she said, laughing. “But they got better and better.” Kruman’s mother helped her refine her technique and come up with ideas. Kruman said that with her mom’s assistance, her craft went from a hobby to a skill.
Kruman originally had no intention to sell her creations. “I didn’t take myself seriously!” she said.
But her parents, sister, and her sister’s best friend recognized her talent. They encouraged her to post her designs on Instagram, create a logo and set up her brand.
Kruman said she was “blown away” by the interest. Orders poured in through her Instagram DMs, and she soon set up an Etsy page to sell her designs. In the beginning, she said, “It (orders) always came from people asking me, as opposed to me really pushing the brand out.” Now, Kruman uses the proceeds from her business to fund part of her tuition and rent, but also donates 15% of the money she makes to organizations like The Audre Lorde Project and Planned Parenthood.
“As a political science major, I talk so much about fighting for social justice, and while money isn’t everything, this is one of the ways I can recognize that,” Kruman said.
Kruman realized that she was placed in the unique position of starting a company in the midst of a global pandemic, but surprisingly, COVID-19 did not negatively affect her business model.
“It’s been interesting. I’m trying to think of how COVID has made my business different, but I don’t know anything but a COVID business,” Kruman said. She credits her success to social media’s reach, which thrived in terms of users in the pandemic.
“I will say, if this had been the exact same scenario 30 years ago, I would have struggled a lot more as a businesswoman, because I 100% fully rely on social media and the internet to make my sales…If anything, I think COVID made people be on their phones a lot more, so the chances were higher that they would come across an advertisement for my rings,” Kruman said.
Jewelry-making is intensely personal to Kruman. As a political science major and women and gender studies minor, she considers jewelry-making as her conduit towards expressing her artistic side without it having to be an academic responsibility.
“I really love what I’m doing,” Kruman said, “And I’m really happy. But it’s important that I have it for me. It’s meditative for me to just sit there, listen to music, be by myself and create what I want to create.”
is a senior newspaper and online journalism major. She is editor-in-chief of Globalists and a digital producer for The NewsHouse.
