The Journey of Mooncord: From Cord Knotting to Pearl Jewelry

It was 2020, and like most people, I wasn't going anywhere. I was teaching online, keeping two small kids alive—five and eight years old—and trying not to lose my mind inside four walls. I've always needed to make things with my hands. So, I started knotting cord.

A friend told me about Etsy. I opened a shop and needed a name: Mooncord. Partly because the small town I live in already has "moon" in its name, partly because I was, quite literally, knotting cord.

My early work on Etsy

But cord knotting wears you down in a way that doesn't show up in the finished piece. My neck ached by evening. My eyes stung under the lamp. And the materials were cheap enough that no one ever paid me for the hours I put in — because they couldn't see them. I remember sitting there some nights, hands sore, wondering if this was really it.

At the same time, I had a full-time job that called for jewelry every day, and I kept running into the same wall: everything in the US was either expensive or forgettable. What stung more than the price tag was not being able to find pearls — real pearls — that felt like they were made for someone like me. What I saw in stores ran into the hundreds of dollars, and beyond a plain round shape, there was almost nothing else. It looked tired. Old-fashioned. As an Asian woman who grew up around pearls in a completely different way, that absence frustrated me more than I expected it to. So I taught myself. Video by video, pearl by pearl, mistake by mistake.

My early design with pearls, back in 2021

From 2020 to 2024, something I hadn't dared plan for actually happened — the shop grew. Customers I'd never meet kept choosing something I'd made with my own hands. I had never run a business before in my life, and for a while, it felt like enough proof that I was doing something right.

Then, after 2024, I watched it start to slip. Etsy opened its doors to dropshipping, and the marketplace filled up with sellers who never touched what they sold — just picked, listed, and shipped. I remember the exact feeling of realizing something I couldn't unsee: no one out there was going to remember me. They were going to remember the platform. My name, my hands, my hours — none of that had a place to live. That realization is what pushed me to finally build something of my own.

That decision led me to 2025, and to a website I'm still building, one page at a time. There's no team behind it — just me, teaching myself something new every few weeks, undoing pages I didn't like, rewriting product descriptions I got wrong the first time. Some nights I'm still at the same kind of table, except now instead of knotting cord, I'm staring at analytics I don't fully understand yet, trying to figure out what a stranger sees in the first three seconds on my homepage. It's slower than I expected. But it's mine.

The making itself hasn't changed. No workshop, no staff — every piece still passes through my own two hands before it reaches anyone else's.

We're living in a moment that feels flooded — too much production, too much sameness, and now AI pouring into all of it. I still believe, maybe stubbornly, that what's made by one person's hands, on purpose, is the thing that stays standing after all that noise settles. Like a pearl's own luster — nothing loud about it, just warm, soft, and quietly bright enough to outlast the moment it was made in.