Artbeads.com

Full review
Artbeads.com is a happening place. Products are hip and of high quality, website is seamless, shipping is timely and free!!

Overview
Art Beads sells an appealing variety of beading supplies at wholesale prices. This includes:

Beads: glass, stone, sterling silver, gold-filled, pewter, spacer, alphabet, and seed
Charms: Sterling silver, pewter
A variety of Bali, Hill tribe, and Israeli silver
Components such as crimps, tubes, clasps, bars, caps, tips, etc.
Stringing materials
Tools and supplies
Beading books

Background
So it’s Mother’s Day, right, and I’m in pursuit of the elusive perfect gift. Two of them, actually, for both my mom and my mom in law. I browse through the typical flower, candy, decorative bathroom soaps sites, but nothing strikes me as simply fabulous. But then when I’m flipping through a magazine, not even thinking about gifts, I find it: Mom Bracelets. The perfect gift.

In case you’re stumbling around in the dark, Mom Bracelets are those beaded, charm-accented deals with little silver block letters that spell out the names of her children. Or in this case, grandchildren. Each child’s name gets a different strand, but all the strands are joined together at the clasp to form one bracelet.

The problem, I find, is that I’m not Donald Trump. And these babies are expensive! I’ve got four cherubs running about my place, and the four-stranded bracelets run anywhere between $285 and $400. And did I mention I needed two of them?

So I was back to browsing bathroom soaps when it hit me: why not make them myself? After all, how hard can it be?

Product selection and quality
Enter Artbeads.com. I browsed at least a dozen different sites selling beading supplies, but all the others seemed too something. Too pricey, too limited, too ugly, etc. Art Beads is the single site with a wide selection I loved, at prices I could stomach. And best of all, they ship any order—even a solitary bead—for free. Put “free” in any sentence and I’m there.

Unless you are a beading specialist, I’d imagine you’ll find the selection at AB’s quite satisfactory. They have literally hundreds—perhaps thousands--of beads and charms to choose from, in dozens of colors and sizes. There are 18 different stringing materials, and AB does a decent job of describing the nature of each material and/or what type of project it would be best used for.

For example, Soft Flex Jewelry Wire is described as “marine quality, stainless steel wires woven together and then nylon coated.” It is hypoallergenic, flexible and easily knotted, and can be worn in fresh and salt water.

I was disappointed to find that several items I loved were out of stock (mainly sterling silver charms), but it was very close to Mother’s Day, and I imagine this site may have been exceptionally popular right then.

Website design and ease of navigation
AB’s site is fairly simple to shop. Products are often organized under multiple categories, making them easy to locate. Pictures are clear and detailed, and descriptions generally helpful (i.e. many bead descriptions will tell you how many of that particular bead fill an inch).

The learning center is particularly handy, containing jewelry ideas, step-by-step illustrated tips, and resources.

I am especially grateful for the method of ease with which I can add items to my cart. In the alphabet bead section, for example, I am able to enter the number of beads of each letter I wish to order, then add all of them to my cart with a single click (rather than have to visit multiple pages to order all of the different letter beads). This makes it easy for me to shop and for them to make money. I am truly perplexed that most online retailers fail to employ ordering methods of such ease.

Prices
AB’s prices were comparable or cheaper to the other dozen or so sites I browsed, and far cheaper than any local beading retailer (brick and mortar shop).

In many cases, beads are discounted by quantity. To give you a general idea of pricing:

8 gram bag of transparent Miyuki Delica seed beads: $2.60 ($2.29 for 3-5, $1.98 for 6+)
4.5 mm letter beads: $1.09 ($0.99 for 6-11, 0.89$ for 12+)
Sterling silver “Nana” heart charm: $3.90 ($3.25 for 3-5, $2.60 for 6+)
4 mm Swarovski crystal cube bead (transparent crystal): $0.33 ($0.30 for 50-99, $0.27 for 100+)

Shipping
Currently, all orders from AB have the option of free shipping. Their website states that using this method may add a few extra processing days to the order, but I found the length of shipment quite expedient—two to three business days from the day of purchase.

Each purchase arrives in a padded envelope, with the beads divided into tiny, labeled bags. The bags are then placed in a larger plastic bag, which is wrapped in deep purple tissue paper and sealed with a gold sticker.

Bottom Line
Art Beads enabled me to create lovely Mother bracelets for about $40 apiece—a fraction of their retail cost. Their selection was ample and lovely, their shipping expedient, their quality superior. I heartily recommend artbeads.com for your next beading project.