Like silver and gold jewelry, bead accessories never become obsolete as fashion items, and making them can be fun, low-capital, and profitable sideline or full-time business for the creative and industrious.

You can start your own bead jewelry business for as low as P1,500. This is  all you will need to purchase your main tools – a pair of 2-in-1 pliers (P40) and a long-nose one (P40) – and several packs of beads and stones. To make a pair of earrings, in particular, you will only spend about P150 but you can it up to P750, giving you a clean profit margin of P500 to P600. On the other hand, it will cost you about P270 to make a bead necklace, but you can earn as much as P750 to P900 from it.

“What is good about this business is that you can put a 200 percent mark up. The is because the higher the price of the jewelry, the more the people would tend to value it,” says Em Mariano, a jewelry designer, trainer, and owner of FunDynamics, an arts-and-craft training company.

There are different bead-making techniques, such as looping, stringing, brooch-making, and knotting. For this project, the stringing technique will be used. It requires wire or string to hold the beads together.

All of the raw materials for making dangling earrings and necklaces can be bought at Divisoria, Manila, and at the Wellmanson Sewing Notion store in Quiapo, Manila.