More details: Visit websiteHeadlines:
"When Taylor sang 'make the friendship bracelets', we took that seriously," explains Julia Ducret. She worked with friends to prepare more than 300 friendship bracelets — made of brightly coloured braids and plastic beads, spelling out Taylor Swift lyrics, songs and album titles — to hand out to fellow fans — or 'Swifties' — at Wembley.
Ducret, a recent university graduate, was far from alone in feeling that the lyric — from Swift's song "You're on Your Own, Kid", on her Grammy-winning 2022 album Midnights — had struck a chord.
According to the online craft store Etsy, searches for friendship bracelets surged 22,000 per cent following the March 2023 launch of the Eras Tour in the US, as millions of Swifties raced to share them with fellow fans.
"The impact was really immediate," says Dayna Isom Johnson, trends expert at Etsy, where 77 per cent of UK-based sellers are women — more than double the proportion of the country's female small business owners. Between the start of the tour and December 2023, friendship bracelets of all types had notched up $5.5mn in sales, globally, on the platform.
Watching the trend develop via social media platform TikTok, where there are more than 5mn tour-related videos, English teacher and Taylor Swift fan Coral Mack realised the jewellery skills she had learnt from her mother could be in high demand.
"I thought: I can take this skill and I can help everybody else, and we can all do this in a community, together," says Mack.
Encouraged by a friend to whom she had gifted a set of beads to thread her own bracelets in preparation for the tour's European leg, Mack began trading as The Bejewelled Club on Etsy in August 2023. After sharing her friendship bracelet bead kits on TikTok — each one colour co-ordinated to the aesthetic of Swift's albums, including 2014's 1989 (pastel blues), 2019's Lover (rainbow-coloured) and this April's The Tortured Poets Department (grey) — Mack's sales skyrocketed.
No comments:
Post a Comment