Today we’d like to introduce you to Heather Stringer.
Hi Heather, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
The first jewelry I ever made was a board of hideous Swarovski crystal earrings. And because I’m a numbers person, I wrote the cost of every component in code on the back of each one.
This was 2006, in Austin, the summer before I moved back to Hawaii. I’d just walked away from a full-ride scholarship to grad school for Environmental Economics. I could not see myself running regressions in an office for the rest of my life. A full quarter-life crisis. I had no idea what I was going to do.
My step-mom suggested I make some earrings to sell in the gift shop at our family restaurant, Hickory Street Bar and Grill, down on 8th and Congress. I thought it sounded ridiculous. I did it anyway. By the end of the summer, they had all sold. For $9, $10, $11, $12 a piece. And something clicked.
I borrowed $500 from my dad to buy materials, the only money I ever borrowed to chase this dream, paid it back quickly, and quit my full-time accounting job. I sold jewelry at the Kailua-Kona farmers market five days a week. No day was quite like the last, and I don’t know what I’d do if I had it all figured out. Nobody does, and it would be boring if they did. I love that almost twelve years in, I feel like I’m just getting started.
After two years at the Hawaii market, I took six years off to raise our three boys. When I came back to it, I wanted to make a feminine version of a Polynesian rope necklace, the kind that usually holds a carved bone hook on a thick rope. I started experimenting with the process and the materials, and it took months to find exactly the right one. Real nautical-grade rope, made to take the elements. That one white pearl rope necklace was the beginning of something brand new. The rope collection took off, and then it took over.
I founded the Padre Island Farmers Market and ran it until I moved home to Austin. My team kept it going until we passed the baton earlier this year, after ten solid years. Now it’s time to focus on the jewelry 100%.
I grew up in Austin. Kindergarten all the way through the University of Texas. I left for about fifteen years, then came back seven years ago, and West Austin is home now. My workshop is in my backyard. Best commute I’ve ever had.
None of it felt like a path. The travel, the accounting job and many others, the markets, the move home. And yet all of it was.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
No road is smooth, and I wouldn’t trust one that was.
The big one is that I’ve never taken outside money. Beyond that first five hundred dollars from my dad, which I paid back fast, we’ve funded all of it ourselves. More than a decade of growing slow and figuring it out as we went. We’ve definitely been having some growing pains lately, but we are pushing through.
A couple of years ago I had a health scare. I won’t go into all of it, but it was the wake-up call I needed to start taking better care of myself. I feel like I got a second wind. Now that I’ve built myself back up, I’m ready to build this company the way I’ve always wanted to, just didn’t see how – streamlined from the inside out. Tula Blue feels like it’s becoming a whole new thing right alongside me. And I’m so here for it.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Tula Blue is jewelry you can live in. You put it on and you don’t take it off. Not for the shower, not for the ocean, not for sleep.
We make it on hand-spun rope. It starts as nautical-grade twine, and our makers spin it by hand into a rope that’s metal-free, waterproof, and made to be worn every day for years. We add freshwater pearls and real stones. No metal clasps to catch in your hair. No metal in the rope to tarnish or bother your skin.
Everything is made by hand in Texas by a team of almost twenty women across two workshops. One on North Padre Island and one in West Austin, which we call the Tula Treehouse.
What I’m most proud of is what happens after someone tries it. They don’t buy one piece. They become collectors. It’s a whole collection of jewelry, and a whole community of women who wear them. People tell me they don’t get it until they’ve felt the rope on, and then they’re hooked. I’ve watched that happen for years, and it still gets me every time.
We also open the Austin Treehouse to the public twice a month, noon to six. You can watch the makers work, shop the racks, and get something custom-made on the spot. Kids are welcome. And special for the summer, we keep a bowl of special gems they can pick through and take home on a rope necklace we custom make and size on the spot, for twenty dollars.
How do you define success?
For the longest time I thought success was balance. A perfect even scale. Tula even means balance in Sanskrit, which is part of why I named the company what I did.
I don’t think of it that way anymore. Life comes in seasons. Right now I’m in a full hustle season. I’m taking a twelve-week business course this summer, putting real systems in place and getting the whole operation tight for the first time. My boys are bigger now, so the business is getting more of me, and I’m glad it’s getting it.
Real success, for me, is making a product people love. Quality materials, real craftsmanship, and a brand that doesn’t look or feel like anything else out there. It’s a workshop full of women whom I hope to lift up, which has mattered to me from the start. And it’s giving back. We’ve donated more than $50,000 so far.
Right now, I’m pushing on all of it. Revamping our partnership with PADI, planning something different for Giving Tuesday to support ocean conservation, showing up live on Whatnot, going all in on the website, and selling direct.
What I want most is to turn customers into collectors. Not so they buy more. Because the pieces start to mean something. You put one on before a trip, or during a hard year, or for no reason at all, and it stays on. Then there’s another. Women feel like themselves in it, and they find each other in it, at the market, in the comments, in the water. It’s the part I never planned for. And it’s the whole point.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.TulaBlueRope.com
- Instagram: @tula.blue
