About Bead3: Our Family-Owned Bead Business
Welcome to Bead3, your online source for beads, jewelry-making supplies, and DIY beaded jewelry kits. We are Rod and Kim Connors, the family behind BeadBuddies and Bead3. Since 2004, we have been helping jewelry makers find beautiful beads and supplies for their creative projects.
As experienced online bead retailers, we understand how important product selection, quality, clear product pictures, and dependable service are when shopping for beads. We offer a wide variety of semiprecious gemstone beads, Czech glass beads, crystal beads, jewelry-making findings, and DIY kits designed by jewelry artist Kim Connors.
Whether you are making your first bracelet, designing a special piece of jewelry, or stocking up on supplies for your next project, we are happy to help you find what you need.
Bead3 by BeadBuddies. We have sold beads and beading supplies online for over 22 years! Our first website was www.BeadBuddies.net. We started that site when online shopping was still in its early days. We programmed a lot of the site using html and pictures had to be very small for the site to function smoothly. In 2015, we moved from that site to our first modern platform, www.Bead3.com. We still operate that site today. It generally functions really well but the hosting platform does run slowly sometimes. Many years ago, it was running very poorly for a few months! That's when we realized we had to create another site. In 2022, our newest site, www.Bead3.net came into existence and is still our preferred site today. It runs on the BigCommerce platform and generally runs very smoothly with large pictures.
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2004 — BeadBuddies.net
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2015 — Bead3.com
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2022 — Bead3.net
We started www.BeadBuddies.net in 2004 - We started operating out of Georgia and ran this site a couple years after moving to Florida.
We started www.Bead3.com in 2015 and it started while we were in Florida and still operates today while we are in Tennessee.
We started www.Bead3.net in 2022 while in Florida right before we relocated to Tennessee.
All 3 sites have always been owned and operated by Rod and Kim Connors.
When we launched BeadBuddies.net in 2004, we were still using dial-up internet service! It could take hours just to make small changes to the site. Adding a new line of products took an extremely long amount of time!
We have always been a small family owned and operated business and we are very proud of that! Also, whether you started with us in the beginning or joined us along the way, we are so happy to have you! Our BeadBuddies allow us to keep doing what we have been doing for 22+ years now and we thank you all!
We specialize in many great beads but our favorites:
A few other interesting tidbits, our products have been on Etsy and Amazon. We no longer sell on either of those platforms and concentrate 100% on our platforms! We actually started our first website before Amazon Prime was in existence! When we first launched BeadBuddies in 2004 there were only a few other websites selling beads online. We made a couple other bead sites while looking for the best website hosting platforms but were not happy with them so they did not last too long. We have sold at lots of craft shows throughout the years but haven't done one in quite a while!