We catch up with Erika Sandor to chat all things Beadingschool

Hi Erika, can you start by telling us more about your current business:
Beadingschool is the online extension of my personal beading stash. I create
an atmosphere where beaders feel as if they were reaching into my turquoise
drawers and as if we would select colours and shapes together. We specialise in high-quality, inspiring findings, beads, and components. We ship worldwide, and safe shipping with track and trace is free above 100 euros. We are super proud to make beady wishes come true in Europe, the UK, and the USA, as well as in countries like Peru, Iceland, Taiwan, Indonesia, Costa Rica, and South Africa.
When you invest time into a beaded motif, you want the best quality earring hooks or pendant holders to do them justice and value your work. We have hundreds of different designs, including designs with Cubic Zirconia inserts, made in Germany by the Neumann factory.Our collection of historic filigrees is also unique. The family we work with to revive these models rescued the stampings from a scrapyard where they were thrown out during the socialist era. The stampings come from the first half of the 20th century but are made now, following the strictest European regulations regarding metal components.

Beadingschool is one of the most important partners of Preciosa crystals in the beading world, and we are excited to be allowed to use the special ‘Preciosa for Creators’ logo on our website. This means that we are in intensive cooperation with the headquarters in the Crystal Valley, and Preciosa trusts that we present their beautiful products in a way that they can be proud of.

What products do you stock? I always choose what I find inspiring personally. I want to be able to answer every question from our beaders when they are wondering about using a shape or combining a colour. Nowadays, my friends and fellow designers (Zuzi Hake and Veronka Kralovicova) help me to keep our beaders inspired, too.
This is why the whole Beadingschool Bead Shop feels so personal, even if nowadays we stock tens of thousands of different beads and components.
Of course, we listen to our beaders, too. I love gently challenging them with new colour combinations and innovative components while safely guiding them on their beading journey. I do the same to set an example. I used to say that I would never work with black and white, and now our main collection is black and white, with lots of gold, silver and crystal 2x AB! That’s what I needed to feel comfortable with it.

Do you have anything that makes your business unique? I dare to say that we have multiple specialities! The Beadingschool Academy is our most valuable program. It’s a bi-monthly beady membership. Our Students receive artistically curated theme boxes of exceptional quality and tutorials to work with the collections. They can participate in challenges, listen to storytellings, and meet each other through our online Lunch Breaks. Everything is always centred around a specific source of inspiration: ‘Fly Me to the Moon,’ ‘The Jewel of the Maharaja,’ ‘The Bavarian Princess’ to give you some examples.
Sometimes we invite a designer to become a patron of a collection. In the past, we had Heather Kingsley-Heath onboard, and now Helena Tang-Lim is working with us. Pikapolina - Apollinariya Koprivnik started to cooperate with us, too, and she finds the collections inspiring and of high quality. You can become a member at beadingschoolacademy.com.
Besides the Academy, I am very proud of our art cabochons. They are at the crossroads of art and engineering. Beautiful pieces, especially the ones with stampings, in colours that are easy to combine with Japanese and Czech beads. Thanks to their precision they are perfect for us, beaders - since a small difference in size or angle can make or break a design. Thanks to their flat backs they can be glued to Ultra Suede, but also bezeled with Peyote or shaped beads. There are round, navette, star, trapezoid and many other shapes available, and we develop new shapes and tutorials to go with them continuously.

Do you run classes/workshops at your shop? I started to teach a weekly beading workshop in March 2020, when the pandemic started. All in-person classes were suddenly cancelled, leaving everyone without social contacts. Mental wellbeing is very important to me because of personal reasons. I struggled with heavy depression for a decade until I finally processed my childhood traumas. That’s why I felt that I needed to step up. Since that time, we have met every week: Thursdays at 5pm CET/4pm UK. After nearly five years, we are going stronger than ever!

Do you interact much on social media? Yes! We are very active on Facebook and Youtube. We have close to 500 educational videos for beaders on Youtube. Most of them are recordings of beading workshops and lectures about different tools, techniques and types of materials. Sometimes, I also interview beaders or designers.
My favourites are the ‘Live Design’ videos when I work with a selected range of material (for example, Beadingschool Academy Boxes) and design something on the spot. Sometimes I have an initial idea and then I see if it works. Other times, I invite beaders to join me on the screen during a live video, and they guide me in choosing colours and shapes. It’s kind of a community creation!

What have been your biggest hurdles in setting up/running your business? What have been your proudest moments/successes? The biggest challenge is to adapt to continuous change. We run big operations, like the Beadingschool Academy or our 24-day-long Advent Adventure. It requires serious logistics! My close friend and business partner Andrea taught me that we always need to have a plan B, C, and sometimes even D and E in place to make it happen. Even then, we might end up going with F.
Personally, it was challenging for me when the business was in a phase where I couldn’t give myself a salary. We were already busy, and I was working 6 days a week, 10-12 hours a day. However, we had to invest everything back. It affected my self-worth, and I restricted myself rom going out with friends, having other hobbies, etc. I consciously had to make a decision to change it. This is proof of how important it is to value our time and skills when we price our beadwork, too!

Have you any upcoming news to tell us about? We are always busy at Beadingschool :D In 2025, we have six new Beadingschool Academy Themes coming up. We will travel to an exotic land and visit a bazaar, then take a closer look at the mythology of a fairytale land. I can’t say anymore for now! I am super happy with the new colour combinations and excited about the shapes we are going to play with.

We will also strengthen our collaboation with the Neumann clasp factory,so beaders who love German quality should keep an eye on us. There will be a new collection of handmade art cabochons. And of course, big celebrations of Beadingschool’s birthday at the end of April. There will be a new Beader’s Calendar for 2025 - with 12 tutorials that are published one by one, always on the first Monday of every month.

Thanks to Beadingschool’s proximity to the Crystal Valley in the Czech Republic, we regularly visit our partners - bead makers. We were the first beading company to invest seriously into documenting the bead-making processes, and in the next year, we will continue publishing the professional videos, photos, and of course, the beady knowledge that we gathered.