Grandmother's Buttons

Susan Davis, 46, could never have imagined that looking at old buttons with her grandmother would launch a family business, but that’s exactly what happened.

It all began in 1984, when Davis and her husband, Donny, left their high-pressure jobs—she was a public relations specialist and he worked as a wildlife biologist—in Baton Rouge, La., for the more relaxed atmosphere of her hometown, St. Francisville, La. (pop. 1,712). While Donny began working as a farmer, Davis started looking for ways to make money from crafts.

One day, Davis was next door visiting her 95-year-old paternal grandmother, Bettie Gandy Garrett, and she came across old boxes of buttons from her childhood. “She kept everything,” Davis recalls of her grandmother.

Together they rummaged through a lifetime collection of “stuff” that day, and eventually Davis had 30 boxes of buttons, some rather new and ordinary, but some quite unusual and nearly a century old.

It wasn’t the first time the two had admired the buttons. She recalls many times being a kid at her grandmother’s house, hunting through an old cigar tin “sort of shaped like an oatmeal box and filled to the brim with buttons of all shapes, sizes and colors. Some had bumps like gears, and I could put them together so they’d move. My favorites were those that looked like apples and calla lilies. I could do so many things with those buttons—sort them, string them, have make-believe parties with them.”

As she reminisced, Davis wondered if those buttons would spark fond memories for others as well. “That’s when I had an idea to turn buttons into jewelry,” Davis says.

She then set up a booth at a Baton Rouge craft fair, where she sold her entire stock of button-crafted jewelry, earning $1,000. For Davis, it was the beginning of a new business, one that she would eventually call Grandmother’s Buttons, in honor of her beloved grandmother. “I think what she would have loved most of all is that it’s named after her,” Davis says.

A few years later, business got so brisk that her husband quit farming to become full-time business manager of the company. In 1996, Davis traded the craft fairs and wholesale market for her own retail store in the original 1905 St. Francisville bank, a two-story brick building with arched doors and windows. “It’s the same bank I came to when I was a little girl to open my first savings account,” she says. Inside, the original oak woodwork and mosaic tile floors provide a perfect old-time setting for making and selling vintage jewelry.

The second floor is a workshop where a dozen local women, working in a relaxed, familial atmosphere, assemble the jewelry.

But the store’s real treasure is the small museum housed in the original bank vault, a space just 10-feet square. There, among rare buttons from the French Revolution and George Washington’s first inauguration, is one of Davis’ grandmother’s button boxes, a Calumet baking powder tin still overflowing with buttons.

“I never guessed Susan would use those old buttons to make a national business,” says Miriam Garrett, Davis’ 85-year-old mother. “Her grandmother would be thrilled. “I wear her jewelry constantly. I’m her best model,” she adds.

Today, Grandmother’s Buttons produces both one-of-a-kind antique-button pieces and handcrafted reproduction jewelry composed of everything from recreated Victorian perfume buttons to glass, porcelain and calico buttons resembling those made in Staffordshire, England, in the 1840s. The jewelry, which is sold by more than 1,000 retailers, has been featured by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Smithsonian Institution.

Davis also is continuing the tradition with her own daughter, Anna. The 16-year-old has designed jewelry for her mother’s company in recent years and appears on the cover of company’s recent catalog.

“That makes me very happy,” Davis says, particularly since she sees herself as a link in a continuing line of mothers and daughters—fastened together by buttons and love.

For more information, call (800) 580-6941 or log on to www.grandmothersbuttons.com.

Andrea Gross is a regular contributor to American Profile.

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