The prices of the beautiful jewelry from Mufi are a bit higher than I normally feature but there’s good cause. 100% of the profits are donated to an orphanage in Liberia. The proceeds from the Pearls for Girls bracelet all go towards Help Lesotho, an organization that educates teenage girls orphaned by HIV/AIDS in Lesotho, Africa.

Geekware has jewelry, accessories and household items made from vintage computer parts. There are earrings and cuff-links made from keys, RAM keychains, CD clocks and much more. The notebooks are making me reminisce about the days in elementary school when picking the color of my floppy disc was a very big deal (although I always ended up with red).

Bombalurina has jewelry that combines Victorian posh, 70s kitsch and the occasional touch of rockabilly. The lockets are especially beautiful- running the gamut from dainty to punk- and their rings are some of the most inventive I’ve seen in quite a long time. Best of all, the pricey looking products are actually very affordable.

There are indie retailer trends that I’ve come across time and again in different formats. There are zombies, robots, pirates, steampunk and…mustaches. Here are five ways to channel your inner Tom Selleck.

Oh Steampunk, how you’ve obstentatiously grown. Anyway, I’m drawn in by anything that combines gears with shiny jewels, so its no surprise that COGnitive Creations caught my eye. Lots of whimsy, a strong personal aesthetic and an ability to edit down the extraneous details are all skills evidenced by this shop’s craftsperson. The prices seem to run the gamut, but they seem to be tied in pretty well with the quality of the materials involved.

I am a big fan of “to do” lists because I usually have a lot going on and I’m working with a very small, cluttered memory span. While Remember the Milk does the trick for me online, I’m still a fan of the pen and paper variety because of one thing: stickers. Yes, at 27 years old I am still incredibly motivated by charts with stickers awarded for achievement. How’s that for social conditioning?

It was through the stickers that I came to find MAUstudio. Came for the little ninja stickers, stayed for the accessories and stationary.

Twenty Nine 29 was recommended for an Indie Retailer spot by Cangrejero. The shop’s wares include handmade tin pressed cards, jewelry adorned with origami paper or crochet.  

Fanciful Notecards in Blue, 4 blank cards with envelope for $12.00

Particularly as we move into an increasingly digital age, some folks get further enmeshed in the nostalgia of lo-fi and I’m not ashamed to be one of them.  So take a second and check out these different jewelery pieces using obsolete train tokens.

NYC subway pendant, $20  by sweet kathleen

A surefire way to get your shop featured as an Indie Retailer is to have a necklace shaped like a saltine cracker, as Emily E Jewelry does. What makes it even better is the fact that I was eating that type of cracker when I discovered the store. Vaguely meta. 

Golden Saltine Brass Necklace, $24.00

The Weekend Store’s jewelry has some themes that seem popular among indie retailers of this genre: birds, typewriter keys and watch gears. But their takes on the themes are still interesting and worth a view: 

Time Flies Ida Necklace, $36.00