EAST BRANDYWINE -- Bits of broken glass that wash up on the beach inspired two big-city workaholi... 20 years of making trash i

EAST BRANDYWINE -- Bits of broken glass that wash up on the beach inspired two big-city workaholics to quit their Manhattan corporate jobs and design their own jewelry line.

Nearly 20 years later, the company sells wholesale with a national and international sales force of seven. It also publishes a catalog and operates a retail Web site.

White Light Productions, the maker of Seaglass jewelry, was founded in 1986 by Mark and Carol Hall, a married couple that started dating when they were students at Cherry Hill East High School in New Jersey.

"We came from New York broadcasting. We got five weeks vacation a year and that was the only time we saw each other," said Mark Hall, 43, sitting with his wife in the couple’s modest office at the company’s workshop on Route 282 overlooking the Brandywine Creek.

While they were on one of those vacations, Carol Hall spotted copper earrings at a seaside craft fair in Maryland. She wanted them immediately. Her husband said, "No, we can make them ourselves."

The couple did indeed go home and make earrings with copper wire left over from a home-improvement project. Beach glass was incorporated when a female friend gave the Halls her collection.

The Halls had saved enough money to get the business off the ground and make ends meet for one year with only Mark’s income. And so, White Light Productions was established and its product, Seaglass, a line of jewelry using colored glass found on the beach, was launched.

The couple lived in Rahway, N.J., at the time, using the second floor of a three-story building as their living quarters and the top floor as their workshop.

Demand was such that before long, the couple exhausted their supply of beach glass. In desperation, they started using smashed wine bottles they found in the alley behind their home. Eventually, the couple cleared the alley of all its broken bottles and they had to go looking for other sources of colored glass.

After a few years, the couple moved to Chester County, attracted to its rural vistas that they found more artistically inspiring than flat tar roofs, the view they had during their city days. They now live in a house in East Brandywine on 10 acres with three streams and a pond.

"When you work seven or eight hours a day in your basement, when you come up, you want to see something pretty," Carol Hall said. "New York was not very pretty."

Now a more sophisticated jewelry company, the Halls attend four fashion wholesale shows a year, with colors in their jewelry customized to complement the colors in vogue that season. Between the wholesale shows and the company’s sales force, Seaglass is sold throughout the Caribbean, at seashore resort towns on the East and West coasts, and at museums and art galleries.

Because of a new federal law that mandates that national parks sell made-in-America products at their gift shops, the Halls have added a new market for their product, Carol Hall said.

The business is often courted by companies that offer them cheaper production costs to manufacture offshore, but Carol Hall said they always decline.

The couple strives to design six new lines, for a total of 18 pieces, each year. To keep the collection manageable, they retire about a third of their lines every three to four years.

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