Baked Beads, a Waitsfield jewelry maker for 35 years, is closing
Photo: miketnorton, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
For 35 years, a jewelry business that started with a car full of beaded necklaces has been one of the Mad River Valley’s better-known exports. Baked Beads, the Waitsfield company Robin and David Cohen built by driving its pieces around to shops across New England, ships its last wholesale orders on Nov. 5. By the end of November, the Cohens expect to be out of the 4,000-square-foot building on Main Street they designed two decades ago.
The couple held their final Columbus Day weekend tent sale Oct. 9 through 11, closing out a tradition that drew shoppers from around the region for more than three decades and raised money for local schools and community groups along the way. “This is the last one, so we’re just letting it rip,” David told The Valley Reporter before the sale.
A business neither of them planned
David arrived in Vermont after three years of backpacking around the world. He came to visit friends in the valley, went to a Fourth of July parade, and stayed. He had studied hotel management and worked as a financial consultant on feasibility studies for hotel developers and banks. Robin was living in New York, working in advertising and marketing, when the two met through mutual friends in 1991.
By then David had started making beaded jewelry and driving it around to stores. Robin moved to Vermont and brought her design and marketing background into the business. They married in 1993, and their twin daughters, Marley and Thea, were born in 1995.
The division of labor came naturally. David ran operations and finances. Robin designed the pieces and handled marketing and sales. “We’re so different,” David said. “It was obvious how to split up the domains.” They made a habit of not talking shop at home, scheduling meetings instead when something needed deciding.
Bridge Street, the flood, and a new building
Baked Beads began in the couple’s house before moving to a space on Bridge Street in Waitsfield village, near the covered bridge. At its peak there it employed about 20 people, many of them high school students. “So many kids got off the bus and worked with us,” Robin said.
The 1998 flood changed that. Flooding pushed the business out of its Bridge Street space, and the Cohens moved temporarily to the third floor of the same building. They decided they needed a permanent home outside the floodplain, and getting one took years. Permitting was complicated, and the couple bought additional land to satisfy Act 250 requirements before moving into their own building in December 2002.
David still remembers who showed up after the water went down. “When we got flooded out in ’98, people we didn’t even know were coming down and helping us dig through the mud,” he said.
Why they are closing
The decision came down to the economics of wholesale. Baked Beads hit its peak in 2009, when it sold to about eight times as many stores as it does today. The pandemic sped up the loss of brick-and-mortar customers and wiped out the trade shows that had been an important part of the business. Rising costs, inflation, tariffs and labor expenses did the rest.
“We thought we would work into our 70s,” David said. “And now it’s just — it was a financial decision. We can’t cover the overhead if we stay open.”
The Cohens sold the building on Aug. 31 to Bruno Grimaldi and Sharon Dube and are renting it back through November while they wind down.
They had expected to slip away quietly. “We honestly thought we were just going to slip away, just quietly go,” Robin said. Instead, after they announced the closing in July, customers wrote and called to say thank you. David said he now sees people who came to the tent sales as children bringing their own kids.
What comes next
Robin has already been spending Mondays volunteering at the Waitsfield and Warren libraries and works as a mentor. Both want to travel and spend more time with their daughters, who live in New York City, and David plans to put more time into volunteering and fitness.
Neither describes the business as just a job. “I’ve loved my job,” Robin said. “I don’t think of it as a job. It’s just a lifestyle, and we have had a great lifestyle.”
David gives the valley much of the credit for how long it lasted. “I don’t know if we would be here after 35 years if we hadn’t moved into this community,” he said. “The support we got from day one was amazing.”
