(upbeat music) - [Isabella] How many beads do you think are in this place?

- A billion, I dare anybody to come count.

(upbeat music) My name is Tony Antonelli.

I'm part of my family business, the Wolf E. Myrow Company.

We have all different kinds of glass beads, semi-precious beads, semi-precious rhinestones, brass chain, steel chain by the spool.

We have plastic beads, plastic stones, we have charms, we have bead caps, we have clasps, we have pins, we have hooks, we have connectors, we have, you name it.

If it's used in the jewelry business, we've got something here.

It started way back just after the second World War.

Wolf had a very good idea.

There's always excess and there's always demand.

He would buy it at a very low price and then turn around, mark it up enough to make a profit and resell it back to the other people in the industry for what they needed.

He started to look around for a partner.

He found my grandfather and evidently it worked because we're still here.

We're kind of old school here.

The workers here are responsible for certain areas.

(upbeat music) We do not use a computer at all.

We've had a lot of different clients here.

One that sticks out in my memory quite a bit was a woman that turned out to be a belly dancer.

So she was here buying bells and trim for her costumes.

(bells ringing) She had kind of a built-up hairdo and I'm looking and something started moving in her hair.

All of a sudden I saw a little, a snake poke its head out from her hair.

I don't know how she managed to keep it there but she spent the entire time here with a snake in her hair.

These are some of our older stones.

Some of these are from the turn of the century, the last century.

A lot of them were individually wrapped back then and that would go into very fancy jewelry if somebody wanted to make kind of a statement.

Rhode Island for the longest time was the costume jewelry capital of the world.

(jazzy music) Everybody had somebody in their family some way that was touched by the jewelry industry.

All the way back, a lot of the craftsmen came in from Europe.

They would make their fine jewelry for the rich and the famous of the time.

After the Depression, a lot of people couldn't afford anything pricey.

But you have these craftspeople who needed to still provide for their family.

So very talented people who used to do very high-end work were now plying their trade with base materials.

Instead of gold and silver, it was brass, it was steel.

Instead of accenting it with emeralds and rubies and sapphires, they accented it with glass, with rhinestones, with plastic.

(relaxed music) - [Isabella] What happened to the costume jewelry industry in Rhode Island?

- Well unfortunately, manufacturing in China can be done a lot cheaper.

The early to mid-90s, that's when it began to really steamroll and unfortunately a lot of the jewelry industry that thrived here for decades, it has withered and is no longer around.

My family works very hard.

(upbeat jazzy music) (electronic beeps) The fact that we do have such a wide variety of merchandise, we still touch on a lot of different uses.

Our material has been on television and on the movies.

- Robert, come quickly.

- What is it?

- Apparently the oven's broken down.

- [Robert] It can't have done.

- [Tony] A gentleman came in who was a head costume designer for "Downton Abbey."

He needed to source rhinestones and parts to use in designing the jewelry that the cast would be wearing during filming.

- We can't just give up.

- Certainly not.

Do you think I might have a drink?

- And we had a large stock of turn of the century rhinestones that he bought and he used to design around.

(upbeat jazzy music) Over here in this corner is our rhinestone chain stock.

All different sizes of spools of different types of rhinestone chain.

We had representatives from the Walt Disney World come in.

They were freshening up the original Pirates of the Caribbean and they needed to freshen up the treasure chests full of jewels and they took back hundreds and hundreds of pounds of clear plastic beads and gold-plated chain and shiny rhinestones.

If you work in jewelry and you work in arts and crafts or designing, there's something that's gonna catch your eye.

There's gonna be something here that you're gonna see.

It's all under one roof.

I would like it to keep going.

I think we provide something almost as a legacy now.

It almost works backwards now.

Where my grandfather wanted to provide for the future, we're almost like we owe a legacy, a debt to my grandfather to continue it, grow it and keep moving it forward.