Archive: August ’08 on The Fresh Daily

Rachel's Fall Favorites

Well, it’s about that time of year again; school is almost back in session and the nights are made of a crisp, damp breeze. Personally, autumn is my favorite season. Although I’m usually a bit reluctant to believe that summer has basically passed, the thought of sweaters and boots makes it all worthwhile. Here in Michigan, autumn is sometimes far too short of a season, chilling the air enough for our first snow before Halloween! It’s just enough time to break in your fall wardrobe, but leave you longing for it again the next year. With the first peeks of fall fashion on the newsstands, I thought it would be fun to tell you what I’m excited about this year!

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Sshhhhhhh, she’s finally asleep, I sneak upstairs to my beading room and hold my breath — did I just hear her cry? Back downstairs…

7 years ago when I was graduating from college, I had a nice little jewelry business going. Like so many of you, I started out displaying my jewelry anywhere they’d let me. After a couple of years, I was selling my pieces in 5 boutiques, I had many regular customers every year at the Ann Arbor Art Fair, and I was getting a steady stream of calls for custom pieces.

Me and my Mom at my Art Fair booth

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Purple Passion

Judy M. from Clarksville, TN designed the 1000th customer Fresh Pick yesterday! The Lima Team is so excited about this, we’re sending Judy a $50 Lima Beads Gift Certificate.

Judy’s Fresh Pick is called “Purple Passion”.  See all 6 of Judy’s picks.

What are Lima Beads Fresh Picks?

Fresh Picks are arrangements of beads created by members of The Lima Team and customers like you. They’re good for generating endless ideas for color and texture arrangements and are meant to be a launch pad for your designs. You can Design Your Own Fresh Picks just like Judy did. Click here to learn more.

For even more information, check out Ali’s blog post about the history of Fresh Picks!

Thank you to Judy and all of the other great Lima customers who have been designing Fresh Picks. We have some exciting things planned for them! If you want to get lost in design ideas — you can view all 1023 customer-designed Fresh Picks now!

Lima Lunch Specials have been released for August 26, 2008! Last week’s specials were super-popular, and we’re hoping that we can match the excitement with the new deals. There are 9 deals again this week, including gemstone beads, copper, pewter, and a big pendant! In order to be eligible for these deals, you have to be on the Lunch Specials e-mail list… so if you missed out this week, make sure to get signed up for next week!

Here are the specials that we’re sending out today…

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Fall is my favorite season in Michigan. The air is crisp and fresh, the food delicious, and the colors are inspiring. This fall also marks the second anniversary of the first full-page magazine advertisement for Lima Beads! Little did we know how much work it would take to define the “look” for Lima. We spent days pouring over concepts, colors, and clichés to arrive at something we wanted to put our stamp of approval on. I thought I would share our experience with the design process of the our very first ad, including some of the ideas we tossed in the trash before we found the right choice.

We love defining our goals for our designs. Our goals for this ad were:

1. Introduce Lima Beads.
2. Feature fall colors.
3. Be fun.

Live a Little.

Focusing on fall, one of our first ideas was to use leaves made of striking color to reach out and “grab” the reader. Our mascot, the little green Lima guy, would be jumping in pile of leaves like we do as children (… OK, and adults) in Michigan. Take a look at a rough concept–BIG color, but there’s one thing missing… BEADS! How could we publish an ad without and beads in it?!? So, we moved on…

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I had the idea for Fresh Picks about 3 years ago. We were still a very small company, but even then, customers were asking us for projects and ideas. I’m not a very technical beader, my designs are usually very simple. It’s the interesting combinations of colors and textures that make them great. To start designing a piece, I just dump a bunch of beads onto my beading table and start grouping them together. My husband thinks I’ve made a giant mess, but after a few minutes (or hours) I have some interesting combinations. After that, it’s just a matter of stringing the beads together, which to be honest, is my least favorite part of the process. I like seeing the beads and visualizing finished pieces in my head – that’s what really gets my creative juices flowing. Like most beaders – my beading table is a disaster when I’m finished. Each time Kevin gets a little piece of wire jammed into the bottom of his foot, he says I have to move it into the basement, but we all know that will never happen!

My Beading Desk

I really wanted to create something that would help our customers get those creative juices flowing, without giving them step-by-step instructions.

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Lima Beads is a small bead shop in Ann Arbor, MI. We pride ourselves on the quality of our products and the quality of our relationships with our customers. We started in the spare bedroom of a college apartment and now work out of a downtown historical building. We love what we do. We obsess over details. We provide consistently great quality. We spend the 15 minutes before lunch deciding what to eat and the 15 minutes after lunch talking about how good it tasted. We laugh with each other and with our customers. We strive to provide a great value. We don’t strive to sell the cheapest beads. We give back to charities. We respect the environment. We’ll make sure you’re happy with Lima Beads.

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