OUR STORY
About Us
Carolyn & Kristi
founders and co-designers
We’re Carolyn & Kristi, founders and co-designers behind Hang Ups Jewelry Designs. We specialize in artisan jewelry, handmade in our Kansas City, MO and Powell, OH studios. It is our mission to change lives with our jewelry, through its emotional impact on customers and through giving back to our non-profit partners: Band of Angels and Literacy Kansas City.
We are known best for our handcrafted jewelry from retired musical instruments—what we call our Band of Angels Collection. It all began with our shared belief in the power of music. In 2012, we began a partnership with Band of Angels, a non profit founded by Meyer Music and Fox 4, Kansas City.
This amazing organization collects musical instruments from the public and then refurbishes them to give to kids in need who wish to participate in Band and Orchestra Programs. The stories we hear are heart-wrenching, heart-warming and tear-evoking; happy and sad. It’s easy to see that the folks at Band of Angels change lives every single day.
As parents of young, passionate musicians ourselves, we are incredibly proud to partner with this incredible organization in our own special way. You see, some instruments that are donated to Band of Angels are not repairable, so we use them to create artisan jewelry that appeals to music lovers and music makers. A generous portion of every sale from this collection goes directly to the Band of Angels Scholarship Fund, which sends kids in need to music camps every summer. It is our special way to help kids who have dreams and who depend on music to help them through life’s rough patches.
We also have a Literacy Jewelry Collection. As avid readers, we believe in the limitless potential that a love of reading provides to children, their parents, and society as a whole. So with each piece of “word jewelry,” we hope to bring awareness to the importance of literacy programs in our communities, like Literacy Kansas City.
Literacy Kansas City is the only non-profit organization in the Kansas City area dedicated to helping adults achieve personal, academic, and career-related goals through teaching them reading, writing, math, and computer skills. As surprising as it seems, there are nearly a quarter of a million adults in the Kansas City area who struggle with things like reading a prescription, helping a child with homework, and paying bills. Our friends at Literacy Kansas City do important work. A portion of every sale from our Literacy Jewelry Collection goes directly to help Literacy Kansas City programs and students.
As you can see, we care deeply about making things the right way, but we also want to run our company the right way. You can join us in making a difference with the purchase of a piece of our wearable art. We hope that you will love it as much as we love creating it.
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