On the opening weekend of Taylor Swift’s sold-out summer concerts at London’s Wembley Stadium – the final leg of her record-breaking Eras tour – lines outside the venue were hundreds of metres long to purchase official merchandise, but the most coveted souvenirs were free.
“When Taylor sang ‘Make the Friendship Bracelets’, we took it seriously,” explains Julia Ducret. Together with friends, she made over 300 friendship bracelets – made of colorful braids and plastic beads that spelled out Taylor Swift’s lyrics, songs and album titles – to hand out to other fans – the ‘Swifties’ – at Wembley.
Ducret, a recent college graduate, was far from the only one who felt the lyrics – from Swift’s song “You’re on Your Own, Kid” on her Grammy-winning 2022 album “Midnights” – struck a nerve.
According to online craft store Etsy, searches for friendship bracelets increased 22,000 percent in the U.S. after the Eras Tour launched in March 2023, as millions of Swifties rushed to share them with other fans.
“The impact was really immediate,” says Dayna Isom Johnson, trend expert at Etsy, where 77 percent of UK-based sellers are women – more than double the country’s female small business owners. Between the start of the tour and December 2023, friendship bracelets of all kinds generated $5.5 million in sales worldwide on the platform.
As English teacher and Taylor Swift fan Coral Mack watched the trend develop on social media platform TikTok, where there are more than five million tour-related videos, she realized the jewelry skills she learned from her mother could be in high demand.
“I thought, I can use this ability and help everyone else, and we can all do this together in a community,” Mack says.
Encouraged by a friend who gifted her a bead kit to string her own bracelets for the European leg of the tour, Mack began trading on Etsy under the name The Bejewelled Club in August 2023. After sharing her bead friendship bracelet kits on TikTok — each color-coordinated with the aesthetic of Swift’s albums, including 2014’s “1989” (pastel blues), 2019’s “Lover” (rainbow colors) and this April’s “The Tortured Poets Department” (gray) — Mack’s sales skyrocketed.
5.5 million USDWorldwide sales of friendship bracelets on Etsy between April and December 2023
By the time the Wembley concert series began, Mack had delivered 1,092 sets of bracelets, generating total sales of £20,000. “I’m very emotionally attached to jewellery,” says the designer, who sees the friendship bracelet as a rebellion against societal expectations of what femininity should look like.
Growing up in Newcastle in the 2000s, Mack helped her mother – a civil servant and part-time jewellery designer – spend her evenings making bracelets to sell at local craft markets at weekends.
“I didn’t really get to watch my mom express herself. She had to go to work, dress a certain way, and fulfill all these roles throughout the day,” Mack says. “But then one night, when she was making these bracelets, I got to watch her creative expression.”
“That’s what has always stuck in my mind: that you can sit down and make something beautiful out of a few pearls, and that it gives you even more power when you turn it into a business.”
Johnson has tracked how each of Swift’s moves has created new jewelry trends. Among other things, sales of watch necklaces on Etsy increased by 25 percent after she wore a vintage Concord watch that had been refashioned into a necklace by jewelry designer Lorraine Schwartz to the 2024 Grammy Awards.
Her friends Victoria Watson, a trainee lawyer, and Alyssa Bridson, a graphic designer, came to Wembley from the Isle of Man wearing matching watch necklaces and bringing friendship bracelets they spent months making from kits bought online to share with other concertgoers.
“She has such a distinctive style for every era,” says Bridson. “(The watch necklace) was so striking, so we had to do the beads, the necklaces and the watch.” For her, the friendship bracelet is a celebration of female togetherness. “It’s about girlhood and sharing that creativity. You look around and see how much effort people have put into their costumes.”
Standing next to her outside the stadium on Wembley’s Olympic Way, wearing a green velvet costume inspired by the forest aesthetic of Swift’s 2020 album Evermore, Kent student Kat Leyton agrees.
“Friendship bracelets aren’t so much about what they look like, but what they represent: friendship and community,” she says, gesturing to the other Swifties around her. “We’d never met before and now all of a sudden we’re walking around together and that’s really what it’s about.”
Leyton, who had already seen Swift on the Eras tour in California, followed her to Wembley when friendship bracelets were all the rage.
For Kat McKenna, author of Look What You Made Me Do: The Ultimate Guide for Taylor Swift Fans!This devotion represents the increasing globalization of the fan base.
As with previous tour stops, all of Swift’s Wembley dates last month were live-streamed by concertgoers on TikTok and shown to thousands more fans in front of their TVs. Due to seemingly insatiable demand, the video-sharing platform announced in June that Swifties can now collect “digital” friendship bracelet beads and share them with their fans online.
“Fandom before social media was private until you actually got to the live show or wore the concert t-shirt,” says Ole Obermann, TikTok’s global head of music business development. He hopes efforts like the platform’s Eras Tour in-app experience will amplify the two-way migration of fan culture between the online and real worlds.
Coral Mack remembers how empowered her mother felt when she wore her own jewelry, and she gets the same feeling when she sees other Swifties wearing the friendship bracelets she made from her kits. As fans prepare for Swift’s return to Wembley in August, she’s been inundated with orders for kits. Now she plans to keep her jewelry business going long after the tour ends in December.
“It really means to me that I was able to turn this into a business… It gave me the strength to believe that this is something special and can help you build a community,” she says.
“I’ll just remember it differently now.”
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