Early January

On New Year's Day I wandered into Eva Anderson's new store. I'd been to the previous one and was wondering whether she'd be carrying beads and beading supplies again, but she doesn't. But she said to me (who she didn't really know from Adam) "This town needs a bead store".
Right after that I found myself in front of a locked door to what I thought at the time is the closest to a local bead store there is in Hilo. Ben Franklin had closed early because of a football game (college football no less, but it was a bowl game).
Driving around taking care of other stuff like errands (to me holidays usually are days to get some extra work done outside of work) I decided to try to give this a go and the name became HiloBeads.
After I got home I did some research into prices on-line and found it entirely doable to sell beads for a lot less than what I have been paying myself, and if I can do that locally I'll probably find some takers.

Then I emailed some suppliers asking them stupid questions, and Eva, asking her stupid questions too, but they're all nice people and slowly things started to fall into place.

On the 7th (January 2008) I registered hilobeads.com and didn't go to sleep until I had a front page up - which is a bit of a thing to do if you're in the process of finding your way around your webhosting company on a notebook -, as well as placing my first order. The second and third followed on the 11th.

In the meantime I had found out that there are 2 other people selling beads in Hilo and I met with both of them in their selling locations on Saturday (Jan. 12). They're both very nice (bead people. What do you expect?), one is a seed beader who makes intricate stuff that I'd have problems seeing if I tried it, the other one is a wire wrapper, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to take a class from her, and she bought a lb of Job's Tears from me.

Some more web pages came into existence during this time as well.

Eva's store is Hilo Art & Glass, located downtown, where Farmer's Exchange used to be. She is planning on and Art Glass Fair in April and asked me whether I'd like to provide the other things needed to make jewelry out of the beads in that fair.