How to Start Collecting Costume Jewelry

Step 1: Find the Piece That Calls to You

Every great collection starts with a single spark: one piece that hits you on a personal level and stops you mid-scroll. Don't worry about whether it fits into a grand scheme yet. Just find the piece you can't stop thinking about.

For me, it was the multi-link Africa bracelet. Living in Tanzania, that design hit home immediately. The way the silhouettes captured the wildlife and landscapes I see every day made it impossible to ignore. That single piece was the gateway drug that led me straight down the rabbit hole into the rest of the line.

In the context of Wild Bryde, looking at the multi-species necklaces is a good place to start. They often serve as indexes of sorts for their respective collections, with their individual links available in earring or pin form as well. However, you can always focus down on one species, or one cross-cutting group like big cats.

Find your anchor first. Is it a specific animal? A botanical motif? A vintage piece that reminds you of a place you love? Start there.

Step 2: Pick Your Primary Metal Finish

Once you have your anchor piece, establish a baseline for your metal finish. Having a primary focus gives a sprawling line of hundreds of designs instant visual cohesion when you store or wear them.

In the Wild Bryde universe, you generally have three routes:

• 14k Gold Plate: Warm, classic, and high-shine. It highlights the subtle facets of planished sheet metal beautifully and accounts for the vast majority of vintage production runs.
• Rhodium Plate: Bright, cool-toned, and ultra-durable. Perfect if you lean heavily into silver-tone wardrobe accents. However, it is more challenging to find rhodium-plated pieces in great shape, and some pieces were only made in gold.
• Sterling Silver: If you like a challenge, hunting down true solid sterling pieces from small studio runs is the ultimate secondary-market treasure hunt. It takes more maintenance to keep bright, but the weight and patina are unmatched. That said, it limits the pieces you can seek out, because only a small subset of their designs were created in sterling.

You don't have to be dogmatic about it, but picking a primary finish early on keeps your core collection looking intentional rather than chaotic.

Step 3: Define Your Collection Structure and Personal Style

Now that you have a core metal and an anchor piece, decide how you actually want to build around them. How do you like to wear your jewelry day-to-day?

• Matching Sets: Are you a perfectionist who loves a crisp, coordinated look? You might focus on hunting down the exact matching drop earrings or bracelet for your favorite focal necklace. You can see all known sets or click on "Sets" in the menu of each collection.
• Thematic Groupings: Maybe exact matching feels a little too rigid for your style. You can build around a broad narrative instead - a "Rainforest" theme, a dedicated bird species index, or a collection focused strictly on nocturnal animals. Maybe only items in teardrop frames, or heart shapes. It's up to you!
• Layering & Mixing: If your personal style is more eclectic, focus on varied lengths and line profiles so you can stack and layer different etched panels together.

Step 4: Source the Pieces

This is the fun part.

1. Figure out what you can afford - I highly recommend creating a budget for yourself before beginning to shop! Wild Bryde pieces are affordable but picking them up can become addictive.
2. Check the "usual suspects" - Ebay, Poshmark, and Etsy are the highest volume. Utilize their apps and offer systems to get the best prices. Gem app searches across all of them at once. Shopgoodwill is also a hidden treasure.
3. Look out for good deals AND special pieces - Wild Bryde created thousands of different designs. Some pieces are truly special and unusual, and worth snapping up as soon as you see them. But lots of others show up again and again - in those cases, wait for a great deal before you pounce. For instance, the multi-animal Africa necklace is common on the secondhand sites. Single-animal pieces focusing on elephants and giraffes, respectively, are much rarer - so I picked those up first, before they could disappear from the market.

Step 5: Storage and Display

There are so many options, but I'll share my personal favorite, after trying many. I love a hanging organizer: it allows me to see all my pieces at once, group them by theme or animal, and the visible empty spots remind me to put things back after I wear them. I have one rack for my Africa pieces and one for others that I just had to have, for various reasons. They're available for around $10 each on Amazon, along with many variants. I prefer the version that has both necklace and earring sections, but depending on your personal collecting focus, you may feel differently. There are also versions with plastic pockets, which are great for preventing tarnishing on silver.

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Step 6: Break Your Own Rules

Here is the most important rule of collecting: don't let your "system" turn into a cage.

If you stumble across a piece that completely violates your primary metal choice, sits outside your chosen theme, or breaks your collection layout - but it absolutely takes your breath away - buy it anyway.

For me, that wildcard was the Domestic line's "Layered Koi Fish and Water", which I write about more in another blog post. It had nothing to do with my African wildlife core focus, but the way the etched concentric water rings caught the light on that planished gold-plated sheet was just too gorgeous to pass up. I couldn't resist it, and it remains one of my absolute favorite items in my entire collection. I'm actually wearing it today as I type this!

Rooted in What You Love

A collection should reflect your genuine curiosity and joy, not a rigid checklist. Start with what moves you, build a flexible structure around it, and always leave room to be surprised! Whatever your brand of choice, I hope you have a great time.