Crazy Crow Trading Post offers a tremendous selection of wholesale venetian beads & related beading supplies. During the era of exploration, beads were a major trade item used as a currency in dealing with native peoples in newly discovered lands. Different peoples and regions favored different tastes in bead types, shapes, and colors. This as a natural part of supply and demand led to the diversification of bead manufacturing. Then as today, it’s about offering what the customer wants. For you, it will be to satisfy the person wanting to make seed bead earrings, or a Venetian glass bead necklace. For traders to Africa hundreds of years ago, it was “African Trade Beads”. For Spanish explorers of North America, it may have been chevron trade beads (carried first by De Soto), and later a variety of seed beads that would transform the way Native Americans decorated their clothing and other objects of importance.