(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- By August 2020, Tracie Campbell and Adrienne Nappi were ready to close the New York locations of their business Brooklyn Charm. After a decade of selling make-your-own beaded bracelets, necklaces and earrings for $35 to $75 on average out of a storefront in Williamsburg and a booth in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, they came up against the Covid-19 pandemic. Foot traffic was down, and they were burnt out. They announced a closing sale on the store’s Instagram account.
Initially the sale drew about 10 people a day to their Brooklyn flagship. But after about a week, the shop was suddenly flooded with 5 to 10 times as many customers. As it turned out, Marc Sebastian, a model and stylist who counts almost 2 million followers on TikTok, had posted a video of his visit to the shop, where customers select charms that employees attach to chains. “They have every kind of bead, charm, shell, crystal etc you can think of,” he wrote in the video, which has had over 172,000 views and received nearly 50,000 likes. “If you’re in NYC, go support a small business affected by COVID!”
i’m back, baby. armed with about 15 high fashion kindergarten teacher necklaces. #nyc #brooklyn #smallbusiness #jewelry
The financial boost from that, combined with online sales, was enough for Campbell and Nappi to get by for several months after shuttering the store’s two locations in New York. But it wouldn’t be the last time their business would benefit from an injection of internet fame. Brooklyn Charm also had a shop in Ventura, California, which Campbell continued operating through the pandemic. In early 2021 a TikTok video by an influencer touting that location went viral, and once again, sales temporarily boomed. “Literally overnight, it was just like the store was slammed for months,” Campbell says.
This gave Campbell the support she needed to make the California shop profitable, and it gave Nappi, who’d stayed in New York, the confidence to relaunch the business locally. In May 2021, Nappi reopened a stall at Chelsea Market inside Artists & Fleas, a business that licenses space to local vendors. After two years of consistent sales, she opened another store—this one in the Greenpoint neighborhood back in Brooklyn.
Then along came another transformative TikTok post. In June 2023, the same week of the Greenpoint location’s opening, Artists & Fleas posted a video promoting Brooklyn Charm on its TikTok account. “Come with me to make my own jewelry,” the narrator says, panning over trays full of charms—tiny letters, mushrooms, doughnuts and Zodiac signs—before creating a custom necklace.
@Brooklyn Charm has all you need to create your own timeless piece ???? Did you know Brooklyn Charm started selling with us over 10 years ago? Today, they're opening a new location in Greenpoint! Swing by their booth at @Chelsea Market today ⭐ #diyjewelrymaking #diyjewelrynyc #nycthingstodo #nycexperiences
If the first two viral moments had brought a helpful boost, this one turned Brooklyn Charm’s entire model on its head. Nappi says in the month after that video, sales at the Chelsea Market location rose almost 300% from the same month in 2022. (Brooklyn Charm declined to provide specific figures.) “It was the hardest year of my life,” Nappi says. “It was just pure chaos.” The business didn’t have enough staff to manage the influx of customers into the 7-by-7-foot booth inside Artists & Fleas or an adequate supply of premade charms. At one point, facing a two-month backlog, Brooklyn Charm had to shut down online orders altogether. To accommodate their (new) newfound fame, Nappi and Campbell increased their staff across their three locations to about two dozen employees and adopted a waitlist system using an app that helps restaurants manage walk-in customers.
Why the obsession with charms? One customer, Laura Hornby, a 26-year-old public-relations professional living in New York, says Brooklyn Charm’s do-it-yourself approach appeals to younger people seeking relatively low-cost, creative activities they can share with friends. “This is the perfect activity that’s making something yourself [that’s] relatively affordable,” she says.
Nikita Walia, a New York-based brand strategist, offers an expert’s perspective: Charm bracelets tap into a number of Gen Z trends, including fashion from the 1990s and 2000s and a yearning for real-life experiences after the pandemic. “A charm bracelet is about showing all the different sides of your personality in a really quick snapshot, the way that you would your Instagram grid,” she says. “Gen Z’s really eager to be perceived in a certain way through their consumption, and that’s how they’re trying to find connections with each other, through these little consumption communities.”
A year after the Artists & Fleas video, Campbell says the business is still riding the surge. Customers are still constantly talking about the business on TikTok and other platforms; on Instagram, almost 24,000 posts are tagged #brooklyncharm. The waitlist system is still in place at the Greenpoint location; on weekends, customers generally need to arrive by 12:30 p.m. if they want any hope of getting served. While demand has leveled off somewhat, Campbell says she expects it to spike again as the holidays approach—her business is largely driven by gift-giving. She and Nappi plan to increase their staff and inventory for the season, doubling or tripling her orders of the most popular charms, like cherries, Zodiac signs and anything New York-themed.
As powerful as the attention has been for sales, managing an internet-famous business has also been challenging. Nappi and Campbell closed their Chelsea Market booth this summer because of the stress of managing large numbers of customers in such a small space. They still find it difficult to predict demand when placing orders with manufacturers, and the explosion in popularity has made it harder for them to find the sorts of secondhand vintage charms they used to be able to buy in bulk.
Meanwhile, other local businesses are profiting from the trend. At the Midtown Manhattan jewelry emporium Beadkraft, owner Ken Byun says foot traffic has at least doubled in the past year, which he attributes directly to the trend set off by Brooklyn Charm. “People are looking more for experiences,” he says. “That’s where a lot of our value is currently in this economy.”Read next: How Jellycat Plushies Became a Gen Z Obsession
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