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Twyla Dill didn’t always want to make jewelry. She came across it by accident.

After studying Arabic at Edmonds College in Lynnwood for a year, Dill made plans to move to Lebanon in 2011, making what was planned to be a brief stop in Istanbul, Turkey, to visit a friend before landing in her new home. Instead, she remained in Turkey for a year and learned how to make custom jewelry by crocheting lace onto different materials. “I’d never made jewelry before,” Dill says.

“I’d never even had any intention to make jewelry.” But learning this technique was pivotal to propelling her craft into the fully fledged business that it is today.

Dill officially launched her business, Twyla Dill Design, in 2015, taking it from an Etsy shop to an established business. Based in Seattle, Dill sells earrings, necklaces, rings, bracelets and nose rings that each feature hand-made metal and crochet lace designs. She had been selling her pieces in Pike Place market for the past five years until last fall, when she challenged herself to sell $100,000 worth of jewelry in 55 days and took her business fully online.

Dill was inspired to set her $100,000 sales goal by her business coach, Gina Knox, who created a program to help her clients focus on saving $100,000 in 55 days. Because Dill had inventory worth that much, she decided to set an audacious sales goal instead.

“We sat down together and said, ‘what would it take for you to hit that amount of money saved?’ And it turned out that she would have to sell $100,000 in order to have enough left after expenses to hit the savings amount,” Knox said. “She started with a lot of skepticism, but has grown immensely.”

Prior to the challenge Dill’s monthly sales fluctuated from as low as $5,000 to $42,000, with high months around winter holidays and late summer. She knew the challenge would stretch her.

Dill began in late July, posting about it on her TikTok and Instagram pages to hold herself to it. Despite the initial fear of pushback from her community, she received support and sales as views, likes and followers continued to rise across platforms.

“It was terrifying to put that out there. I felt kind of like I was gonna throw up when I posted about it,” Dill says.  “What I realized pretty fast is that people actually just wanted to support me.”

Throughout the process, she learned to capitalize and build on momentum. On her 30th birthday, for example, she publicized a 30%-off sale by sending out emails and posting consistently on social media throughout the day. That was her biggest day of sales as she sold nearly $20,000 worth of jewelry.

Her online sales momentum allowed her to pursue another goal: leaving her stall at Pike Place market to sell through her website full-time. She left on Sept. 5 after Labor Day weekend, around 39 days into the challenge with $72,000 sold since she had started. She ended up selling the remaining $28,000 in around two weeks through online sales, meeting her goal one day before the challenge was complete.

“One thing that I learned is that we really look for momentum outside of ourselves,” Dill says. “While it is important to be cheered on by other people, momentum actually comes from within yourself. The end of the goal was an arbitrary date. It didn’t mean anything at all. But I just chose the date and created momentum around it.”

Though Pike Place gave her a level of consistency that she needed at a certain point in her business’ journey, she realized that being there wasn’t serving the lifestyle she wanted. Selling jewelry at Pike Place Market was akin to having a 9-to-5.

“Pike Place is an amazing place for artists. The amount of tourist traffic and local traffic through there is really wonderful,” she says. “But I really wanted my life to be freer. I want to travel more. I want to be at home more. I want to have a more flexible schedule.”

The energy and buzz she built from the challenge allowed her to finally step away from the market and take a break from work altogether. After the challenge, Dill took a five-week trip to Spain, coming back in late November ready to take on the holiday season and prepare for the new year.

Her next goal is to grow her business enough to allow her to travel for two months of every year, and Dill is changing her jewelry-making process entirely. Rather than crocheting every single piece, she is embracing metal casting, in which she crochets a single design, makes a mold of it and casts it into solid metal. The result of this uncommon practice is an elegant piece of jewelry that has the appearance and texture of lace but the durability of solid metals. The pieces can be worn for long periods of time or while showering and swimming without the chance of them getting ruined.

Her newest collection, launching in March, will feature solely cast lace designs. Moving to this process will allow her to increase the volume of jewelry that she can make without being “tied physically to making the product” for long periods of time.

While Dill hoped posting about her business goals on TikTok and Instagram would help build momentum and attract customers, one thing she didn’t expect was the impact that sharing her story so publicly would have on fellow business owners.

“The fact that hundreds of people reached out to me and said, ‘this is so inspiring,’ made me feel like I can set bigger goals,” she says.

Jewelry maker Twyla Dill has a message for other artists: It’s OK to be successful.

Jessica Griffin Photography

One lesson she hopes other artisans and small business owners can take from her success is that it’s possible to buck the trope of the starving artist. Artists shouldn’t feel guilty about raising prices to make a living off of art, she says, and making good money from art doesn’t make the artist less virtuous.

“We have to recognize as artists that we are not our ideal customers oftentimes,” she says. “Even if we can’t afford what we’re making, somebody else can and will pay for it.”

And though her marketing and social media strategy took her a long way, Dill’s success came from something deeper: a mindset that her goals were within reach. As Knox puts it, “the most important thing is to know that there will be bouts of excitement and momentum and bouts of doubt. But the only way to hit the goal is to hold the belief that it might be possible.”