Seniors Sunny Wang and Siya Sharma have always enjoyed art. Earlier this summer they decided to open up their own jewelry business; Cherry Charms. Read on to learn more about them and their budding business. You can follow them on Instagram and directly purchase their jewelry here. 

Q: Tell me about yourselves, how did you get into this business? 

Siya: We both like jewelry, and we were thinking of starting something for a while, and then one night we were like “let’s start a jewelry business.” So we did research, came up with a business plan, bought raw materials, and started our Instagram account. For advertising, we post all our jewelry posts on there so we can project it to our followers. We haven’t been able to come out with much stuff right now because it’s been so busy with school and college apps, but over the summer, we were working a lot on it.

Sunny: Jewelry was something that we both liked and we wanted to do something that wasn’t random, that both of us enjoyed doing. 

Q: You guys mentioned raw materials, what was the process of getting your raw materials? Did you guys have any experience in jewelry making before? 

Siya: For me, I’ve always loved making friendship bracelets and stuff like that. I just make my own beaded jewelry because I have little kits or whatever. So I always really liked making it. 

Sunny: Siya taught me a lot of the process, like getting the materials needed and finding charms and different materials that were cute that worked with what we wanted our business to be.  

Q: What types of jewelry do you make?

Siya: So what we did is we kind of got a bunch of charms; like we have a butterfly charm, a lighting bolt charm, a heart charm. So we can make a bunch of different things out of that. We make earrings with all the charms we have, we make chokers, pendants, bracelets, anklets. We kind of leave it up to the customer if they want to customize, too. 

Sunny: So we basically also do customizable jewelry, for guys too. We’ve had a few guys [buy] jewelry too. It’s not just geared towards teenage girls. 

Siya: We’ve had guys buy jewelry for their family too.  

Q: So having the basic charms lets y’all make a wide variety of jewelry? 

Siya: Yeah, we got the basic earring backs, charms, chains, clasps, and closures. With that, we can make a lot of items, so our raw material cost goes down. 

Q: Your Instagram mentions your jewelry is hypoallergenic, what metals do y’all use? 

Siya: It’s nickel-free metal. We usually get our raw materials from Amazon, so we just make sure to check that everything says nickel-free. Since that’s the most common allergy. Like, I have a nickel allergy, I can’t wear fake earrings for long. I have a friend who has been wearing her necklace nonstop and she hasn’t had any reaction to the necklace and she has a nickel allergy. 

Siya: I think I kind of taught Sunny a little bit. You know I think around 9th or 10th grade there was a trend of everyone having those beaded chokers. Why should I buy those for 10 bucks when I could make them for a dollar by myself? So I kind of watched a couple of YouTube videos and learned how to do it. 

Sunny: Since we’re both in IB Art, that helps with the creativity aspect of it. 

Siya: We’re in the two-year art program and both of us have taken art all throughout high school and middle school. 

Q: Is this business something you want to continue in college? Or expand it into a full-time business? 

Siya: Honestly it depends on sales. If we’re getting enough sales to sustain it, then yeah of course. 

Q: How have your sales been so far? 

Sunny: It’s definitely gone down since summer, just cause we haven’t been posting and everyone is super busy with school.  

Q: How do y’all balance managing an Instagram business and school plus other clubs?

Siya: That’s why we haven’t been working on it as much, just because we have college apps, IB UNICEF, everything. And that’s why I think our activity and sales have gone down the past couple of weeks since school started. But, we manage. 

Q: Will you guys have any new pieces coming out soon? 

Sunny: We have new earrings we will be putting out soon!