When Liz Fox Roseberry quit her job as a graphic designer, she had no idea she would eventually become a jewelry designer with nearly half a million followers on TikTok (and growing!).
She also never thought she’d sell nearly 20,000 Etsy sales in less than two years and see Lily Collins wearing a pair of her earring jackets in an episode Emily in Parisbut that’s exactly where she is in life right now.
It all started when she left her job of more than a decade in 2021 because she says she “couldn’t stand” sitting in front of a computer anymore.
“It wasn’t my passion,” she says of graphic design. “I see other graphic designers who are i’m passionate about it, and it’s so cool, but it wasn’t me. I would only get excited about a project once every six months. I had been there for so long and I knew I had to quit. I had no plan at all.”
Despite the fact that COVID is still in full swing, Fox Roseberry hoped that her break from employment before landing her dream job would last only “six months”. As her hiatus grew longer and longer, she accepted a work contract that affected her creative skills just so she could earn enough money to continue working.
While visiting New York, she stumbled upon an Alexander Calder exhibit filled with wired cell phones that made her heart skip a beat and sent her creative mind into overdrive.
“In the middle of this exhibit was a small table of these little wire sculptures, and I fell in love with this little cow,” she tells PEOPLE. “I went home and ran to Home Depot, grabbed the shittiest wire and just got hooked. It just snowballed.”
Fox Roseberry admits she wasn’t even really an earring wearer before she started wearing earring jackets, but she loves that accessories are conversation starters and can brighten up any outfit. She started making jackets with matchstick earrings – which became one of her bestsellers – and says she was immediately “obsessed” with what she created.
But at this point in early 2023, her pieces of wire were still something she tinkered with in her home in Austin, Texas. She continued to experiment and showed off her earring jackets on her TikTok account.
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“Everybody loved them,” she says of her early creations. “Everybody said, ‘You have to sell them.’ It was probably February 2023. At that point I had probably $400 in my bank account and I was going to message my old business to see if they wanted me back. But I made listings on Etsy and I just mentioned it on at the end of the video and I’m not kidding, I’ve been condemned ever since because I had this TikTok account.”
In the nearly two years since then, Fox Roseberry has made tens of thousands of earring jackets and grown her business exponentially. As of this writing, her Etsy shop is just shy of 20,000 units sold — and every single piece is handcrafted.
Fox Roseberry has shared a number of videos on her account showing how she creates her earring jackets – dangling pieces that can be paired with any thread. It includes threads with the purchase of jackets, but you can also combine them with threads you have in your collection.
To make the pieces, she manipulates wire into shapes that include simple designs like bows, circles and flowers, as well as more complex creations like snakes, saturns and cherries. Some pieces even include beads to enhance the design – like disco cherries.
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Always creating, Fox Roseberry isn’t shy about sharing prototypes with her TikTok audience, even when they’re a little rough.
“Getting something out just means the next thing is coming,” she says. “You have to believe it will happen. But honestly, anything I have a really great idea, in the back of my mind, I think, ‘Well that’s the last idea I’ll ever have, I guess I’m done.’ But somehow new inspiration comes.”
And her business continues to grow—she now works on a team of five instead of working for just one woman. In fact, her husband, whom she married in 2022 amid her unemployment and search for her dream job, recently quit his job to join her in her jewelry business.
“He’s a web developer who has experience in e-commerce, and we were like, it’s time. It’s time for me to have my own website,” she says.
However, along with her rise to success, one of her biggest highlights was seeing her earring jackets on Lily Collins during an episode Emily in Paris last year, all thanks to her brother Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli.
“Daniel wanted to give his team something special, so he asked me to make earrings for all the girls, which was really sweet,” she tells PEOPLE. “In my mind I’m thinking, ‘This is my chance to put it together.’ So I went all out and sent this huge box of earrings with a bunch of extra matches.”
She says her brother sent her a screenshot of a message from Collins a few months later that said, “Look what I’m wearing in my scene tonight,” but Fox Roseberry didn’t actually know who the message was from or what she meant by “scene.”
Her brother clarified that it was actually Lily Collins, but Fox Roseberry says she didn’t think they would be on the show.
“I didn’t want to get my hopes up too much. Scenes are often cut,” she says.
After watching the first part of the fourth season, Fox Roseberry did not see her matches.
“I said, ‘It’s okay, they’re not in it, they’re not in it, it’s okay,'” she says. “But then it was the first episode of the second part. They were there. It’s like hearing your song on the radio for the first time. It was so cool.”
The Emily in Paris The moment is just one of many moments over the past two years where Fox Roseberry felt her career center was the right move — even if it was a huge amount of work.
“I’m so happy to be working,” she says of her jewelry business these days. “I feel lucky to be able to do what I do.”
She hopes to expand her business in 2025, but knows it will be difficult to do so with her current business model and making everything by hand. It’s something she’s looking into in the hopes that she can meet the demand to fill more orders and hopefully add new products to her business (and maybe even pieces beyond earring jackets). But being a perfectionist and valuing her brand immensely means she won’t deliver a product that doesn’t meet her standards, so she has yet to take this step.
Still, “the sky’s the limit” in 2025, she teases, and she’s excited about what’s in store for her budding business.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education