If you went inside the studio in South End and watched the sisters of Twine & Twig design their stunning one-of-a-kind nature-turned-art jewelry, you’d see two different pictures:
First, there’s Jacquelyn Tugwell, the younger of the two Stafford sisters, laid-back and music-loving, a former hairstylist who loves not just making women feel beautiful but connecting with them, too. On a workspace in front of her would be a mess of scattered wooden beads, shells, antlers and other natural pieces. From the chaos comes creation, which she urges women to wear with anything from a tank top to a wedding gown.
Then there’s Elizabeth White, three years her senior, the first child in birth order and personality, an organizer and planner, with all of her materials categorized into orderly piles.
“I cannot function until someone cleans up,” she says.
Growing up in Greensboro, White was always the preppy one, who loved to wear Lilly Pulitzer and chose pink and green as her wedding colors, from China down to custom-made jelly beans. Tugwell was grungier, hippier, and now has a dining room adorned with record albums to prove it.
As for what they’ve learned in 12 years of making jewelry for Twine & Twig?
“We’re more alike than we thought,” Jacquelyn says.
“My weaknesses are her strengths,” Elizabeth says.
Together, they create cohesive looks, from bracelet stacks to layering necklaces and stand-alone statement pieces. The sisters grew into women with a similar style, celebrating the world around them—sunsets, the fish in the sea, even the dirt in the ground.
Elizabeth White saves pieces of the places she visits, literally, whether it’s a sample of dirt from underneath the Eiffel Tower or a stick of bamboo from a forest in Japan. She displays them “like a world map of family trips” in glass jars on shelves she converted when her now-teenage twin daughters outgrew Fancy Nancy books.
The Stafford sisters have always shared a love of shell-collecting, which they learned following their grandfather along the sands of Sanibel Island on family vacations. Now with families of their own and seven children between them, they have created lines with shells they brought back from family trips to Costa Rica or Figure Eight Island.
What they’ve found over time, through their business and their lives, is that the ties between them are as strong as the trademark suede in their necklaces. Those straps can carry the weight of turtle shells and more.
Twine & Twig was founded in 2013 when Elizabeth was looking for something to distract Jacquelyn, whose 2-year-old daughter, Banks, had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. They strung jewelry through her recovery and Jacquelyn’s multiple bouts of meningitis, divorce, remarriage and blending a family of four children. They created a stack of bracelets to honor their mother, Meb, who was diagnosed with early-stage leukemia.
“Our company (on Instagram) reads like a diary,” Jacquelyn says. “The platform is way more than jewelry.”
For Elizabeth, more recently, she decided to use it to go public with her battle with breast cancer. She wanted to share a gut feeling, which prompted her to follow up a clear mammogram with a more decisive MRI, and she has multiple friends and followers who have benefited from doing the same.
From the day of her diagnosis, through the multiple surgeries to follow, she leaned on Jacquelyn and the seven full-time female employees at Twine & Twig’s South End location to push through.
“They were like ‘don’t worry about coming to the studio, we’ve got it,’” Elizabeth says. “For four or five months, I didn’t look at an email. I did nothing. We used to be petty, ‘Well, I went on this day,’ and ‘She didn’t go on this day.’ Something shifted in the past couple of years.”
The sisters live 10 minutes apart in Charlotte, with their mother in between. They took the risk of going into business together, without giving it a second thought, and reaped the rewards. Twine & Twig is now available in 250 stores and has a booming business through its website. And they’ve gotten to stay a part of each other’s daily lives.
The two might have a blow-out argument at work on a Thursday, but sort it out by family dinners on Sundays.
“I have friends and clients who never speak to their siblings,” Jacquelyn says. “Or they talk once every six months.”
Together, they’ve provided each other with comfort through the hard times, strength through business challenges like Covid, and throughout it all, the courage to test boundaries. Their early experiments with porcupine quills and boar’s teeth are more refined now, but they still have the same bold penchant for turning something raw and unusual into art.
Their “burr” necklace, which looks like a stylized sun, is actually “the ugly” end of a deer or elk antler, which is naturally shed, smashed into a pendant.
“People said, ‘What is that, a dinosaur fossil?’” Elizabeth says. “It’s something that we just thought was so cool.”
Find Twine & Twig at TwineandTwigStyle.com and on Instagram @twineandtwigstyle.