By Rachael Lindley
Photography by Crystal Wise
There are certain things we inherit without quite knowing what we will do with them.
Long before Gather Goods became a recognizable jewelry brand — before its colorful beaded strands appeared at Round Top, in boutiques across the country and around the necks of Fort Worth women Megan Clifton occasionally spots in public — it began with a collection of jewelry left behind by Clifton’s grandmother, Millie.
“They were beautiful,” she remembers. But she also wondered: What would these look like now? What might a modern interpretation of a fetish bird necklace be?
Clifton’s mother was raised in Albuquerque, where her grandmother developed an affection for Native American jewelry and the turquoise and carved pieces synonymous with the Southwest. After Millie died, Clifton found herself looking through the necklaces she had inherited.
At the time, Clifton was living in Austin with her husband and two young children. After her second child was born, she left her nonprofit job and stayed home. It didn’t take long for someone so naturally creative to start looking for something to do with her hands. So she started making necklaces.
When friends asked to buy some as Christmas gifts, Clifton arranged her pieces across the dining room table and held her first “trunk show” at home. There was no elaborate five-year plan behind it. She had one objective: sell enough necklaces to buy a plane ticket to Tucson for the annual gem show she had long wanted to attend.
Clifton sold all of her necklaces and bought that ticket.
In Tucson, surrounded by stones, beads, makers and materials from around the world, Clifton was hooked. She found herself particularly drawn to African beads with their saturated colors, unexpected materials and craftsmanship. Slowly, two visual worlds began to converge: the turquoise and carved animals of her grandmother’s Southwest and the vivid beads Clifton had discovered on her own.
She calls the Gather Goods aesthetic “Albuquerque meets Africa.”
A Gather Goods necklace is difficult to mistake for anything else. There is turquoise, yes, but also scarlet and cobalt, coral pink and emerald green; carved birds and thunderbirds juxtaposed with tiny vinyl beads; sterling silver pendants strung onto vibrant combinations of color. The pieces feel rooted in the American West without becoming costume, yet worldly without losing their sense of place. They can transform the simplest white shirt, but they never seem to be trying too hard.
That recognizability matters deeply to Clifton.
“I want people to look at my necklaces and say, ‘That’s Gather Goods,’” she says.
Increasingly, they do.
Over the years, Clifton has built relationships with craftspeople, including a New Mexico carver who creates animal designs for her. They sketch and conceptualize pendants, then produce them specifically for Gather Goods. In Fort Worth, a small team of women assembles every necklace by hand in the company’s workshop.
It is a long way from the basement where the business once operated.
As Gather Goods grew, so did the evidence that Clifton’s side project was no longer particularly small. Online orders that local customers once collected from her front porch multiplied. The basement became less of a charming origin story and more of a logistical problem. Eventually, Gather Goods moved into a dedicated Fort Worth workspace, where Clifton now designs while a team strings, clasps and finishes the jewelry around her.
Clifton’s earliest help came from the family babysitter. Other women joined through friends and family connections. One member of the current team was once Clifton’s daughter’s preschool teacher.
Today, retailers across the United States and multiple boutiques in Fort Worth, including Bette’s, Lawrence’s, and Tucker Brown, carry Gather Goods. Clifton releases new designs throughout the year and returns to Round Top season after season. She also searches for exceptional vintage jewelry during her travels, offering those one-of-a-kind discoveries as literal “gathered goods.”
The old pieces remain a source of fascination: lapis beside turquoise, mother-of-pearl, imperfect stones, unexpected arrangements, evidence of another maker’s hand. Clifton is particularly drawn to their irregularity — the fact that the stones do not always match perfectly in size or shape.
“They’re all just unique in their own way,” she says.
The same might be said of the woman collecting them.
Clifton loves color and has little interest in disappearing into a uniform. She credits her time in Austin with helping cultivate that instinct: the city gave her permission to dress like herself, without worrying too much about whether anyone else was doing the same.
It has become something of a personal philosophy.
“You be you,” she says.
For Clifton, originality is less about novelty than authenticity. She wants women to develop their own style. She wants other designers to find their own visual language. And she still finds extraordinary satisfaction in sitting down with a pile of materials and arriving at a combination she has never seen before.
“There’s no better feeling in the world than coming up with a new design.”
Perhaps that willingness to trust an instinct, to recognize when something feels right and move toward it, explains more than Clifton’s approach to jewelry.
Around the same time she was starting Gather Goods, she decided on something entirely different.
Clifton’s best friend, Becky, had suffered an unimaginable loss. At 40 weeks pregnant with her second child, Becky experienced a uterine rupture. The baby passed away, and Becky nearly lost her own life.
Clifton remembers seeing her friends in the aftermath and confronting the helplessness that accompanies someone else’s grief: What could she possibly do?
Then an answer came.
“I just feel a calling to do this,” she remembers telling her husband.
Clifton offered to become their surrogate.
Ask her about the decision now, and she resists turning it into a story about extraordinary selflessness. To Clifton, it was simpler and more instinctive. This was her best friend. There are people in your life, she says, for whom you discover you would do the thing that needs doing.
The process worked on the first attempt, and the little girl Clifton carried is now six. The families are still extremely close and see each other regularly. She knows how she came into the world and occasionally reminds Clifton: “Meese, remember when I was in your belly?”
“Oh yes,” Clifton tells her. “I do.”
It is tempting to draw too neat a line between Clifton’s surrogacy and Gather Goods. One is an act of profound friendship; the other is a jewelry business. Clifton herself would likely be the first to resist making either more precious than it needs to be. She quickly points out that she is, after all, “literally just sitting here making necklaces.”
But she approaches both similarly: she listens to the internal voice that says “do this” before every detail has been worked out. Her advice is always to decide what you want to do. Begin, and figure the rest out along the way.
“Don’t think twice about it,” she says. “You will figure it out.”
Gather Goods is proof of concept.
Nearly a decade ago, when Gather Goods was beginning, Clifton couldn’t have imagined sitting in a Fort Worth studio surrounded by women stringing her designs, shipping handmade jewelry to stores across the country, and preparing pieces for customers who return season after season to see her at Round Top.
“I would have said there is absolutely no chance,” she says. “It’s been a dream.”
Still, success has not eliminated doubt. Before each new release comes the familiar flutter: What if people do not like it? What if this is the collection that doesn’t resonate?
In those moments of doubt, she’ll see someone with one of her pieces in the wild.
Not long ago, Clifton was having an unusually bad day when she walked into a sporting-goods store. A woman wearing one of Gather Goods’ bird necklaces passed her.
Of all the places to be reminded of what mattered, there it was: walking through an ordinary store, around the neck of a stranger.
It still brings tears to her eyes when she encounters her jewelry that way: at the grocery store, at the rodeo, somewhere she never expected it. Someone saw something she imagined, chose it, carried it home, and made it part of her own life.
“It never gets old,” Clifton says.
Maybe that is because Gather Goods has always been about more than making something new.
It is about what happens when something passes from one set of hands into another.