Stacey Bowers wanted to make her friends laugh.

In 2013, she purchased some jewelry supplies and taught herself how to stamp metal. But she did it with a bit of a twist.

She’d grown up in North Little Rock, three blocks from the home she shares with her husband and their three pets. She was the art club president, doing art all through high school. She even worked at Argenta Bead Company when she was 16.

“I had a little bit of basic background on how to make jewelry,” Stacey shared. “Then the stamping is self taught. I just kept at it, and growing it and changing it, and here we are.”

Before she started making jewelry, though, she majored in communications and fell out of art as she pursued publishing.

Then she began making things for her friends. And her hobby grew.

“It was fairly organic,” Stacey said. “I started making stuff, gave it to them as Christmas gifts, posted it on Facebook like, ‘Ah, look at this dumb little thing I made,’ and people liked it. I was like, ‘I’ll just set up an Etsy page.’ And then people started buying it and I was like, ‘It’s kind of fun. I’ll make some more stuff.’ And then I was like, ‘Okay, I’ve been doing this now. I’m going to make a website. And I’m going to try to do it more and control it and have my own sort of image for it.’”

She named her company Bang-Up Betty, after her cat.

“Betty was my beautiful, lovely cat, may he rest in peace,” Stacey shared. “Any little art thing I did I would name after my cat, so I thought Bang-Up, because of the hammer, and Betty because of Betty, and it just came together.”

She started getting more and more attention for the work she was creating.

“People are really drawn to things that I do that are just irreverent,” Stacey explained. “I was making the earrings that say ‘Stop talking’ and ‘Shut up.’ I have some that say ‘F*ck off’. I’ve got my little ‘Nope’ middle finger charm over here. This one I’ve been doing since the very beginning. I’ve got a knife necklace that says, ‘I’ll cut you,’ and then I’ve stamped ‘Get shit done’ on things and people love that, but that’s just a little bit of it.”

She developed a balance between the hard and the soft with her work, using metal and hammers, but making the pieces small and delicate.

“I think it has a lot to do with my own personal taste in jewelry,” Stacey said. “I typically wear things that are small and discrete, and I think a lot of other people appreciate that, too. But my attitude is not small or discrete. It’s a little combination of the inner and outer me.”

As she continued to make things, Stacey moved away from publishing as a full-time gig and transitioned into a marketing and communications career with the Thea Foundation.

“I started as the communications coordinator and became the marketing director,” Stacey shared. “It is a nonprofit that has a lot of programs that provide art experiences, arts education for students who may need help accessing it. They provide a lot of funding for art supplies for schools that are unfunded, training for teachers to expand their craft.”

Her jewelry started getting a lot of attention, as she was noticed by Buzzfeed and other platforms and media. 

“A lot of them found me,” Stacey said. “And I think it just started with them looking at the jewelry and having that same sort of, ‘What does that say? Oh! That’s funny! Who makes that? What’s the story behind that?’ And then they’d reach out to me and we’d start talking.”

She found herself either at her 9-5 job that included weekend hours doing events and scholarships or making things at her home studio.

“Pretty much any waking hour that I wasn’t there, I was here,” Stacey shared. “And it was one of those things where it’s like, I just love doing it. I can’t stop doing it. There has to be a breaking point, at some point, where I either keep doing this like I’m doing this, or I stop doing this. And I decided I couldn’t stop doing this.”

For a year, from 2017 to 2018, she thought about quitting her job and making jewelry full time. 

“It was really emotional,” Stacey said. “I was really in turmoil. Because I didn’t want to quit my job. I loved my job. They were my second family. It took months and months and months. Honestly, a year or more of me thinking, ‘Do I really want to do this? Am I really going to do this?’ I’m going to hit all of these goals and see if I still feel the same way at the end of the year, and just build a giant safety net in case I do quit my job and it all tanks. There was a lot of anxiety involved, and I’m a, I guess what people would call a, Type A personality. I did a lot of planning and thinking out worst-case scenarios.”

She realized she needed to make up her mind and she reached her breaking point in the fall of 2018. 

“I set a weird goal for myself,” Stacey explained. “I was like, ‘You’re going to do this. You back out of everything you’ve ever put your mind to. You back out and go in, back out and go in.’ So I set a trap for myself, and I signed up to do a wholesale trade show in Los Vegas. I sent in all the paperwork and I was like, ‘That’s it. That is happening in February of 2019. And you’re either gonna somehow do this and work full time and use your vacation to do it or you’re going to get out and do this.’”

She made it to Vegas, and with it, her decision.

“It was really exciting,” Stacey said. “I am a very thrifty person and I split a booth with one of my friends who is a candle maker in California. So we met in Vegas and basically split all of the costs. I scaled it way down for myself. I remember the funniest part to me was I built my own display. Most people who have been doing trade shows ship a crate to wherever they need to go. The crate goes to their booth and they build up walls and make an experience for you. People like me don’t do that, especially at my first one. I needed to see. So I built my own display out of copper pipes, and then used a guitar case, like a soft one, on my back and carried it through the airport. Everything went on the plane with me. I didn’t ship anything I don’t think. Maybe some cardboard. And I just remember going through the world’s biggest hotel, with all the casinos connecting, holding this guitar bag full of metal, dying under the weight.”

Now, Stacey spends her time designing and creating jewelry, both at her home studio and Stifft Station Gifts. She works at the gift shop two days a week, or more if it’s busy.

“That was one of the most wonderful things that has happened to me, honestly,” Stacey shared. “Cindi Booth owns Stiff Station Gifts and she’s a fellow jewelry designer. We’ve known each other in passing from doing craft shows and stuff around town. She reached out to me saying she wanted someone to help out and have some input in the shop and bring some new energy. She makes it such a beautiful experience. She’s so lovely. She’s become sort of a mentor to me, too, so it’s just really nice to go there and have a collaborative space.”

Stacey has all of her jewelry and other work on display, and she offers classes like a Bead ‘n B*tch for adults (there’s one coming up this weekend!), or a Bead ‘n Banter for children.

Her advice for others looking to turn a hobby into a full-time job is simple. “I always tell people to be true to yourself,” Stacey said. “Speak your personality. Don’t speak anyone else’s personality. That’s what people want to hear. They want to hear your story. As long as you’re true to yourself, then you’ll love what you do.”

As always, there’s a lot more in the podcast episode! Follow Stacey on Instagram or Facebook or Pinterest. Visit her website here.