We had the good fortune of connecting with Lisa Stotska & William Skiles and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Lisa Stotska & William Skiles, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
Neither my husband or myself were interested in working for someone else. We are both very creative. We started out attending juried art shows with Williams high end jewelry and found it was stressful waiting for sales. William switched his thinking and said, if we could get $1 from everyone, that would be a better strategy. He came up with our original interchangeable marble pendant, and we took a batch of 30 pieces to an art show in Beverly Hills and sold out! After that, we were advised to get a patent, which we did. We now have 3 patents and our lines of interchangeable marble jewelry have supported us for 25 years!

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
William is the creative one! He came up with our first interchangeable marble pendant and we were met with immediate success. From there, we first expanded into making our pendants for 4 other marble sizes. Next we added interchangeable earrings, rings, & bracelets. All our jewelry comes with a selection of marbles to be switched out. I realized after a few years, that our customers were eager for additional colors. I met with gem suppliers and sought out other companies to help us expand on what our customers could purchase to make their jewelry even more customizable. We now provide almost 70 gems that our customers can purchase individually, including some metal marbles that we make, lab created opal, and a wonderful array of faux pearls, natural stones, etc. Because our jewelry is so customizable, in front of the right audience, we do very well. The challenges have been finding the right audience to get in front of. We have found the juried art show circuit to be our best venues. There cannot be buy/ sell, that brings the quality down and then handmade cannot compete with it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
The river walk along the Rillito river is where we would go for a bike ride, and I would take them down to Ren coffeehouse at St. Phillips Plaza for a fabulous cup of coffee and perhaps either an egg sandwich or fresh pastry baked right there. We would also do some hiking around the city, there are so many great spots, but for ease and no travel time, we could go to the top of Alvernon and go right up to hike. Other places to enjoy food, The Cup at Hotel Congress, never disappoints and is a fantastic updated old downtown Tucson vibe. The baked good there are excellent as well as any meal.
Depending on the time of year of my friends visit, we may need to do inside activities. One I really enjoy is yoga at Yoga Pod on Campbell, also at St. Phillips plaza. We also enjoy going down to Safford to the hot springs at Essence of Tranquility, very low key and the soak is incredible, and we even go in the summer!
If the season is right, the first weekend in November is the All Souls Procession, a fabulous community event! You can dress up and participate or watch along the way, it is very well attended and you see a tremendous amount of creativity with costumes as well as capilla’s honoring those who have passed.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Ours was mostly by trial and error, as well as sharing information with other artists about what juried art shows are good, etc. In the beginning, we subscribed to a service called The Artfair Sourcebook, which was incredibly helpful in providing information about the shows. It would tell us when deadlines were, how to apply, what other artists had to say about that venue, what the weather can tend to be, what percentage of artists at any specific show would be jewelers, etc. Sometimes we will drive 2000 miles to a show so having as much information as possible was very helpful. We were also advised early on, by a therapist, to apply for a patent for the tension mechanisms we employ. This was perhaps the best advice we could have had. We now have 3 patents, and this has protected us from others copying us!

Website: Www.gotallyourmarbles.com

Instagram: Www.instagram.com/gotallyourmarbles

Facebook: Www.facebook.com/gotallyourmarbles

Image Credits
All images are our own.

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