What it’s actually like
Giving Bracelets is a small room on Fifth Avenue with a worktable in it. The bracelets on the walls, wraps of leather, natural stone, beads and metal, are made in the store, and the people selling them are often the ones making them. Ten percent of every purchase goes to CASA programs, the court-appointed volunteers who advocate for children in foster care. The shop sits at 7122 East Fifth Avenue, next door to Cartel Roasting Co., and it pulls in a steady stream of people carrying coffee.
The story starts with handbags. Lesa Sawyer, an Arizona native, started designing bags for a class project in college in Los Angeles and built a business selling them to boutiques. When the 2008 recession hit, she was volunteering with Voices for CASA Children and looking for something that mattered more. She had a pile of leather remnants from the handbag work, and she started turning them into bracelets with the giving built in.
It is an easy shop to like. The line is designed for stacking, in finishes from antique brass and gold to silver, brushed silver and rose gold, with vegan options. Earrings, necklaces, rings, handbags and leather goods fill out the room, and bracelets mostly run from about $39 to $169. Purchases leave in reusable linen bags instead of plastic.
What to buy
A wrap bracelet, or three. The signature: leather and stone wrapped several times around the wrist. They are meant to be layered, so let the staff build a stack.
A custom piece. The shop takes custom designs, and because the work is done on site, it is a realistic request rather than a special order shipped from elsewhere.
A small leather good. A nod to the handbag business the whole thing grew out of.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The shop is on the Fifth Avenue curve west of Scottsdale Road, in the Fifth Avenue and downtown district. Use the free public garage on the Fifth Avenue side near the canal or the Civic Center garage off Drinkwater Boulevard and walk; the Old Town on foot note covers the route. Street spaces on Fifth go to the regulars.
Pair it with the coffee. Cartel is next door, and the shop’s own origin story involves Cartel customers knocking on the window to buy bracelets before the store had officially opened. Get a coffee, then shop.
Go when the bench is working. Weekday mornings are the quietest time, and the best chance of watching bracelets being finished and having the staff’s attention for a custom request. Weekend afternoons in high season, roughly January through April, are busy. In summer, do the street early. Thursday’s ArtWalk on Marshall Way brings an evening crowd to the avenue.
Across Fifth, the boutiques of 7121, including The Purple Saguaro and Noir Blanc Candle Company, make up the rest of a small-makers gift run.
Eat while you’re there
Cartel, next door, is the obvious first stop. Original ChopShop, a short walk east toward Scottsdale Road, does bowls and juices for lunch. Citizen Public House, a few doors west, is the gastropub with the chopped salad, and Berdena’s near Craftsman Court is the second coffee if one was not enough.
How it got here
Fifth Avenue began as a makers’ street. In 1950 the artists and craftsmen burned out of the Arizona Craftsmen building at Brown and Main cut a new street through farmland south of the canal, as the Fifth Avenue lexicon entry records. Silversmiths, weavers and potters sold their work from the rooms where they made it, and Craftsman Court followed in 1955. By the 1990s much of that maker culture had given way to galleries and imported gifts, but the format of a small shop with the workbench in it never entirely left the street.
Giving Bracelets brought the format back in a new form. Lesa Sawyer had already done it once: designing handbags for a fashion class in Los Angeles, getting orders from boutiques, and building a business that found well-heeled customers. The recession of the late 2000s ended that run. Volunteering with Voices for CASA Children gave her a cause, and the leather remnants from the bag business gave her a product. The bracelets were made at home and sold at farmers markets for years.
The jump came in 2016, when her husband Trevor suggested taking the bracelets to the wholesale market, the same move that had built the handbag line. Wholesale grew the business past the home studio, and the move into a Fifth Avenue storefront followed. Sawyer’s account of the opening has a detail any Old Town shopkeeper would recognize: customers from Cartel next door were knocking on the windows to buy bracelets before the shop officially opened.
The giving model has scaled with the business. By late 2023 the company counted more than $30,000 donated to Voices for CASA Children, and its beneficiaries now include Project Hawaii, which helps homeless children in Hawaii. It works with older artisans on production, has dropped plastic packaging, and has taken the line to pop-ups as far afield as Phoenix Sky Harbor. The craftsmen who cut Fifth Avenue in 1950 would recognize the operation: a small room, a worktable, and a product made by the people selling it.