Amber Gyselinck-Snyder is collecting a community of people who love stuff. She calls them “trinketeers.”
Gyselinck-Snyder runs Lapis Lily Market and a trinket club. As part of the club, she hosts trinket swaps every six weeks, where people bring their favorite mini objects, dress up for a theme and take home other knick-knacks. She also teaches classes, showing people how to make art out of trinkets by adding them to a mirror or turning one into a bolo tie.
“I really just want to offer a safe space for people to be. They can geek out about their silly stuff — nobody’s judging them. We’re actually all clapping,” she said.
At her first trinket swap in April, over 250 people showed up. Now, she limits the tickets to 140 and picks a theme for every event. The August event was swamp-themed, and Gyselinck-Snyder wore Shrek-like ogre ears.
Starting Oct. 3, her collection of hundreds of trinkets, stickers and jewelry will find a home at a Lapis Lily Market, a trinket store in the Stutz. She plans to host trinket events every Saturday. Gyselinck-Snyder got funding from St’ArtUp317 to create the space, and she’ll have it until next July. St’ArtUp317 invests in entrepreneurs and matches them with vacant spaces to create pop-up stores, installations or events.
One 14-year-old has shown up to three Trinket Club events, asking Gyselinck-Snyder how to get started with a career selling trinkets.
But it wasn’t a clear path.
If you go
Lapis Lily Market
🗓️ Open Monday-Friday 10 a.m.-6 p.m., plus trinket events on Saturdays
📍 The Stutz, next to Pattern, 1060 N. Capitol Ave.
Trick or Trinket
Halloween-themed trinket swap
🗓️ 6-8 p.m. Oct. 7.
📍 2301 E 10th St
🎟️ $5
Gyselinck-Snyder’s start with selling silly things was in 1998 at Uncle John’s Flea Market in Cedar Lake, where she grew up. She brought the Beanie Babies she collected. And at the end of the day, 10-year-old Gyselinck-Snyder had sold enough Beanie Babies to buy a Playstation.
She also started sewing as a kid, making her own clothes. She pursued a fashion major at Indiana University, but ended up with a degree closer to business administration.
After spending 10 years in retail, she first started Lapis Lily Market in 2019. Gyselinck-Snyder sells items online, wholesale to retailers and in Hampton & Co. and Satellite Vintage. This is the first store that’s all hers.
Besides the funding she gets from St’Artup 317, she pays her bills by selling ghost magnets. She’s made around 10,000 in the last two years in her basement that she calls a “ghost factory.” Gyselinck-Snyder sells them to other stores through a wholesale platform.
“I knew I would do something creative. Did I think it would be trinkets? No,” she said. “But I think, especially in 2025, there’s space for all of our fandoms. Whatever you’re into, there’s going to be somebody else that’s into it, too.”
Her favorite things to collect are Frankensteins and monsters, and she married a man who collects Godzilla-related knick-knacks. Topping their wedding cake was a Godzilla in a veil. Now, their collections live on shelves in the living room of their home in Speedway, alongside a rack of “World News Weekly” issues Gyselinck-Snyder’s dad bought every week when she was a child.
Within all this whimsy, Gyselinck-Snyder finds a deep nostalgia in connecting with other people who love collecting.
“That is the type of person that I am now meeting with this trinket club – people that are very serious about their collection, or just the way that these things make them feel,” she said. At her swap events, she does this thing called “Trinket Tales,” where people can get up and tell a story about an object.
“There was somebody who had a long lost trinket, and they’re like, ‘My mom had this trinket!’ And they got up and they’re like, ‘This reminds me of my mother.’” she said. “Oh, these things are so emotional. Sometimes I even shed a little tear.”
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