This Graphic Designer Quit Her Job During COVID. Then Her Jewelry Business Went Viral on TikTok (Exclusive)

When Liz Fox Roseberry quit her graphic design job, she had no idea that she would eventually become a jewelry designer with almost half a million followers on TikTok (and counting!).

She also never thought she’d make almost 20,000 Etsy sales in under two years and see Lily Collins wearing a pair of her earring jackets on an episode of Emily in Paris, but that’s exactly where she’s at in life right now.

It all started when she walked away from her job of over a decade in 2021 because she says she just “couldn’t stand” being in front of a computer anymore.

“It wasn’t my passion,” she says of graphic design. “I see other graphic designers who are passionate about it, and it’s so cool, but it wasn’t me. I would only get excited about a project once every six months or so. I’d been there for so long, and I knew I needed to quit. I didn't have a plan at all.”

Despite it still being the thick of COVID, Fox Roseberry was hopeful that her break in employment before settling into a dream job would only be “six months.” While her break grew longer and longer, she took contract work that played into her creative skills just so she could make enough money to keep her going.

It was while she was visiting New York that she stumbled upon an Alexander Calder exhibit full of wire mobiles that made her heart skip a beat and got her creative mind working in overdrive.

“In the middle of this exhibit was a little table of these little wire sculptures, and I fell in love with this little cow,” she tells PEOPLE. “I went home, and I ran to Home Depot, and I grabbed the crappiest wire, and I just got hooked. It just kind of snowballed.”

Fox Roseberry admits that she wasn’t even someone who really wore earrings prior to her foray into earring jackets, but she loves that accessories are conversation starters and can jazz up any outfit. She started with making the matchstick earring jackets — which have become one of her bestsellers — and she says she was instantly “obsessed” with what she created.

But at this point, in early 2023, her wire pieces were still just something she was tinkering with in her home in Austin, Texas. She continued to experiment and show off her earring jackets on her TikTok account.

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“Everyone loved them,” she says of her early creations. “Everyone was like, ‘You have to sell them.’ That was probably February 2023. At that point, I had probably $400 in my bank account and I was about to message my old job and see if they wanted me back. But I made listings on Etsy, and I just turned it on. I mentioned it at the end of a video, and I'm not kidding, I've been slammed ever since because I had this TikTok account.”

In the nearly two years since then, Fox Roseberry has made tens of thousands of earring jackets and grown her business exponentially. As of this writing, her Etsy shop is just shy of 20,000 sales — and every single piece is made by hand.

Fox Roseberry has shared numerous videos on her account that show her creating her earring jackets — dangling pieces that can pair with any stud. She includes studs with the purchase of the jackets, but you can also mix and match them with studs you have in your own collection.

To create the pieces, she manipulates the wire into shapes that include simple designs like bows, circles and flowers, as well as more intricate creations like snakes, saturns and cherries. Some of the pieces even include beads to amp up the design — like the disco cherries.

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Always creating, Fox Roseberry isn’t shy about sharing prototypes with her TikTok audience, even when they’re a little rough around the edges.

“Getting something out just means the next thing’s coming in,” she says. “You have to trust that that’s going to happen. But honestly, everything I have a really cool idea, in the back of my mind, I think, ‘Well that’s the last idea I’m ever going to have, I guess I’m done.’ But somehow, new inspiration comes in.”

And her business continues to grow — she’s up to a team of five now instead of being a one-woman show. In fact, her husband, who she married in 2022 amid her unemployment and search for her dream job, recently quit his job to join her in her jewelry business.

“He's a web developer who has experience in eCommerce, and we were just kind of like it's time. It's time for me to have my own website,” she says.

Along this rise to success, though, one of her biggest highlights was seeing her earring jackets on Lily Collins during an episode of Emily in Paris last year, all thanks to her brother Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli.

“Daniel wanted to gift his team something special, so he asked me to make earrings for all the girls, which was really sweet,” she tells PEOPLE. “In my mind, I'm like, ‘This is my chance to hook him up.’ So I went all out, and I sent this giant box of earrings with a bunch of extra matchsticks.”

She says it was a few months later that her brother sent her a screenshot of a text from Collins that said, “Look what I’m wearing in my scene tonight,” but Fox Roseberry didn’t actually know who the text was from and what she meant by “scene.”

Her brother clarified that it was, in fact, Lily Collins, but Fox Roseberry says she still didn’t think they would be in the show.

“I didn’t want to get my hopes up. Scenes get cut a lot,” she says.

After watching part one of season 4, Fox Roseberry didn’t see her matchsticks.

“I was like, ‘That’s okay, they’re not in it, they’re not in it, it’s fine,’” she says. “But then it was the first episode of part two. They were there. It’s like hearing your song on the radio for the first time. It was just so cool.”

The Emily in Paris moment is just one of many moments over the past two years where Fox Roseberry has felt like her career pivot was the right move to make — even if it has been a huge amount of work.

“I’m so happy working,” she says of her jewelry business these days. “I feel lucky that I get to do what I’m doing.”

She’s hoping to scale up her business in 2025, but she knows that will be hard to do with her current business model and creating everything by hand. It’s something she’s looking into in hopes that she can meet the demand to fulfill more orders and hopefully add new products to her business (and maybe even pieces beyond earring jackets). But being a perfectionist and extremely precious about her brand means that she won’t ship out a product that doesn’t meet her standards, and that’s why she has yet to take this step.

The “sky is the limit” in 2025, though, she teases, and she’s excited for what’s in store for her budding business. 

Read the original article on People