What We're About

Here at the Rocking Rabbit, we have been selling beads for over 15 years. We started in 1993 selling beads in our gift shop, and it just grew from there. If you would like to read more about our history, please see the related article.

Our watchword has always been to go for interesting high quality beads, but crucially ones which work well in sophisticated jewellery design. We soon found out that if we were to keep to this standard, we would have to source most of our beads from Europe, particularly Italy, home of fashion. We also turned to The Jablones river valley, where the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany meet, source of lovely glass and lead crystal beads, like Swarovski.

Because we have been designing and selling jewellery commercially from our beads for almost as many years as we started selling the beads themselves, we were able to buy ranges where the beads look great together, creating "palettes" of related colours. From this, we discovered that it mattered more what the bead looked like than the material it was made from, which is why sometimes we use high quality Italian acryiic beads in the same designs as real semi-precious stones. So in our range of loose beads, you can find both. Part of our philosophy has also been to pass on this understanding, by grouping beads by design palette rather than material, in some cases, have a look at the TRIBAL: and NATURALS pages of the online shop for examples. We are also just working on a new range of creative assortments working on the same principle, keep coming back to look at the CREATIVE COLLECTIONS secton as we expand the range.

We think you will be pleasantly surprised at the sheer variety of beads we have, and we also hope you will find that we offer the sort of beads you won't find anywhere else. We do also of couse ensure that you can get all the essentials of jewellery making, check out our findings section, and we also have a good range of classic beads such as Swarovski and Semi-precious stones.