We started out as two women with an idea for making something attractive to carry our flash drives. Formerly being in the web design business made the need for carrying a flash drive a necessity; why not make an attractive lanyard to carry them? Then we decided that maybe there were others out there who might want lanyards to carry all sorts of things like keys, cell phones, cameras, id badges, or those little store cards you carry on a keychain. Well, as you can see, this idea developed into an entire website featuring lanyards of all kinds: beaded, fabric, ribbon, and designer inspired, to name our main categories.

So while I, Hilary, worked on creating all these different lanyards, my dear friend and colleague, Julie Warda of JuliaWarda.com, created this lovely site from the ground up. She was able to be patient through the many hours of thoughts, tears, and sweat to have a MAJOR hand in what we are today! Julie is still my sounding board for all the lanyard ideas, both the ones we show and the ones discarded. Thank you, Julie, for still sticking with me and working on the site all the time!

Through much testing, and sending our kids to school with beaded lanyards and finding them broken in a week or two, I have come across a way to make beaded lanyards that can hold up to some pretty hard abuse and still look great doing it! And then since schools don’t seem to like beads all over their floors (HA! I wonder why), we came up with more ideas for lanyards, for example the ribbon and fabric lanyards.

Our beaded lanyards are made with quality glass, ceramic, crystal, and polyclay beads. They are strung on strong tiger tail wire to ensure that they last a long time. Each lanyard is one string to ensure less breakage points and then closed with a crimp bead and a knot that is glued with Gorilla Glue® to strengthen the overall construction. We have the cutest ladybug beads on the neck of all of our lanyards, so you know that you have an original Bead Bug lanyard.

Our Fabric and Designer Inspired lanyards are made from fabric that is hand selected at the beginning of each season for up to date and fun looks. We select a yard of the fabric and bring it home to cut, starch, iron, glue, and then sew together. That’s what makes these so special for us and in the market. These lanyards are still handmade when ordered. We do not buy pre-made lanyards. We want to keep "handmade by Bead Bugs" across our entire product line. We also are working on a way to have all of our fabric lanyards branded with our logo so that again you know you are getting an original Bead Bug lanyard.

Our ribbon lanyards started when we were walking through the store one day and said, "Wow! So many pretty ribbon styles, if only we could make a lanyard with these!" Well, as you can see in our ribbon category, we have accomplished yet another of our ideas. It is fun to make these lanyards. They are simple, but so very attractive and also lightweight for all day use.

If you have actually read all the way to the bottom of our About page, then thank you for doing so! We have never had so much fun working at what we do here at The Bead Bugs. Everyday is a new adventure. Thank you to all of our customers and window shoppers for making our dream a reality.

Handmade with Love,
The Bead Bugs