Crafter goes back to her roots with new effort

MATTAPOISETT —  Teah Keogh’s crafts always reflect where she is in life. 

Her first venture, a viral jewelry business Anchor Me that sold nautical themed bracelets, was inspired by people in her life that anchored her. After the birth of her daughter, she rebranded it as Olive and I after her infant daughter. Now, she has largely closed her first two efforts and started Gypsy & Grace Collaborative to reflect the free spirit she has always been.  

Anchor Me “naturally waned, and my enthusiasm did as well.” The old website will take customers to Gypsy & Grace’s site, and Keogh will still fill orders for the bracelets that went viral. 

Because they are so tied to her identity, Keogh said she doesn’t know if her two previous companies will ever fully go away. But after more than a year of putting her 2.5 year-old daughter to bed and then working until 4 a.m., Keogh said she was “kind of burned out,” and ready for a new direction. 

She has never sold directly to other retailers before, so though her new direction reaches back to her hippie roots, it also offers new challenges. 

She and her husband lived in Denver for a time, where she got into yoga and started noticing others wearing beaded Mala bracelets, which Keogh compared to Buddhist rosary beads. 

Keogh wanted to also adopt the look, but found it “super expensive,” and as a crafter, thought, ‘I could do this.’ 

She noticed that wearing the beads, “gave me this positive outlook, and I didn’t have a lot of opportunities for positivity when I first moved to Denver.” 

At first, she took out the bracelets when she needed positivity. Then, she would “recharge” them doing something positive (like yoga). After about a year and a half, she started using them for meditation. Now the beads, and workshops around them, are the basis for Gypsy & Grace.  

Keogh doesn’t feel that there’s an incorrect way to use Mala, but rather a continuum. “I hope that everyone can find themselves somewhere on that continuum,” she said.  

She realized during the pandemic that she had extra beads around, and decided to make them into kits to sell. She sold out in an hour. 

That effort led her to offer her first virtual workshop a few weeks after she had shuttered Olive and I. She called it “so fun,” and something she would never forget. She realized, “I just wanted to be around people, and they just wanted something to do.” 

Now, she sells Mala, tools to make them and a wide assortment of other bohemian products online at the Gypsy & Grace Collaborative. 

As a business owner, the move was interesting because she “had always been this boho, hippie person, but never had a business that centered around that. Now, I love everything that I am doing, especially the workshops.” 

On June 20 Keogh will hold her first live Mala-making session as Gypsy & Grace at Ned’s Point. To register, see https://www.gypsyandgracecollaborative.com/collections/workshops.