Inspiration struck during a visit with her 95-year-old grandmother. Susan’s grandmother Bettie, born in 1889, was an avid recycler long before the environment was a concern for most people. One of the guiding principles of her life was to save anything that could be repurposed into another useful form. During their visit, Susan was casually digging through the contents of one of her grandmother’s thirty-plus button boxes when she plucked a jet glass button from the jumble, held it to her ear and said, “Grandma this would make a gorgeous earring.” 

Susan absconded that day with all of her grandmother’s buttons and immediately started repurposing them into jewelry. A couple of months later she attended her first craft show and turned some old buttons and fifty dollars worth of other materials into a thousand bucks. It felt like alchemy and Susan was hooked. Some years and many craft shows later, Grandmother’s Buttons landed its first department store account, so Donny parked his tractor and joined his wife as the company’s business manager. 

Susan’s passion for buttons has endured over the decades. To this day she travels several times a year to hunt for rare and beautiful buttons, climbing into grimy New York City lofts, bargaining with flea market vendors, spending hours digging through dusty warehouses and long-forgotten closets. She’s amassed a monumental archive of antique buttons, and other bits and pieces. If you climb the stairs to Grandmother’s Buttons’ second-floor studio, you'll see her collection exploding from every surface, nook, crevice, and corner.