In just one month, Megan Anderson will be celebrating the five-year mark of her business, The Blinging Bluebird. Anderson started her rhinestone and sparkle supplies business on Sept. 15, 2021, learning everything along the way. “When I first started, I didn’t know anything, I just jumped in with both feet,” she said. After her grandmother, Erma Hammermeister, passed away earlier that year, Anderson took pieces of her jewelry, attaching them to some of her early pieces of work. “She was my favourite person, she was somebody that I always felt understood me,” Anderson said. “She was very caring and kind and was somebody that I never felt any judgment with. She supported me and I just know that she wholeheartedly loved me.” That’s where Anderson discovered the world of rhinestones and found that there was a gap in the Canadian market. The journey started in a spare bedroom in her basement, which became cluttered in a matter of time. “I think we had like 40 rhinestone colours, I just had my little table, and that’s where I started,” she said. “Then it grew, and it grew enough that I ended up overflowing into my living room.” Once the basement became too small, Anderson moved to a local warehouse in town but found that it was also too small. In the spring of 2025, she and her husband built a completely new shop from scratch, just on the west side of Carlyle on Highway 13. “It’s nice because we’re the very first building when you drive into town, you can’t miss the bright blue front door,” she said. Anderson supplies the rhinestones herself but also makes custom items. She’s made a custom Roughrider jersey, with a 100-day sweater, where she bedazzled one tattoo on a sweater for 100 days straight. “There’s so many different kinds of rhinestones, what I carry is high-quality glass,” she said. “High-quality glass is what a lot of people choose to use when they’re investing in sparkle.” Anderson says all of her products are shipped from overseas, as there’s no manufacturer that produces in North America. In the past five years, she’s shipped to all provinces, two territories and all of the United States. “Sometimes I can’t even believe that this is what we were able to build, that the demand was here for it, and that it started so small and it just grew on its own,” she said. “I was just the driver.” Offering lessons, Anderson looks to put a sparkle in people’s lives, in memory of her grandmother. “When I first started, I wasn’t thinking of business at all. I just wanted to do something that would help me remember her, that would make sure that her memory never faded,” she said. Anderson has over 17,000 followers and just under 10,000 members on her Facebook page.
