When Bella Weems was 14 years old, she wanted a car -- despite the fact it would be two years before she could legally drive it. Many of her friends were older, and they were passing their driving tests. Moreover, a friend had let Bella drive a very old white, stick-shift truck on some land the family had. When she told her parents, they told her she’d have to pay for it herself.
Bella turned to babysitting but after months of caring for kids, she only had $350 to show for her efforts. At that rate, she thought, she’d never save up enough money in time. Again, she expressed herself to her parents, noting the frustrations of labor-intensive work for low pay. Rather than suggest a second job or offer money in exchange for completing chores or maintaining a particular GPA, her mom and dad offered to match the money she saved from babysitting so she could start a business.
She went looking online for ideas and settled on jewelry -- specifically, customizable lockets -- for a simple reason. “It’s something I found fun and interesting,” she says, explaining she and her mother would go to a bead store on the weekends, long before they ever thought of turning a profit from accessories. Picking a name for the business was done in a similar fashion. When her mom asked her to think of what sort of things she liked, Bella thought of owls. Good, her mom said, what else? Origami was another thing Bella enjoyed, so they put the two words together and Origami Owl was born. The women liked that it sounded both whimsical and wise. Bella says the same is true of the partners’ business dynamic: “I’m the whimsical side; [My mother] is the wise side,” she says.

Image credit: Origami Owl
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To get the ball rolling, Bella held "parties" at her house where friends and family could come and purchase separate chains (between $12 and $22), lockets (between $14 and $46) and charms ($5 each) that they could put together to create pieces that told their individual stories. Bella, for instance, wears a locket that holds a cameo charm in honor of her grandmother, along with a sunflower charm and a cupcake charm because she loves these two things.
After positive feedback from the partygoers -- who doubled as advertisers by wearing the lockets around -- mother and daughter team set up shop in a mall kiosk in November 2011. They sold an estimated $60,000 a month during the holiday season, but more importantly, customers sent them around the country as gifts. Soon the Weems were fielding calls from different states from people looking to buy more. “They thought we were this big company already, not just two people in a mall kiosk,” Bella says. It was time to launch a website.
As the business grew, their plan expanded to include "Independent Designers," or people to host their