Of all the things you could thread onto a string and hang in a doorway, and people have tried most of them (plastic, glass, shell, wooden discs, those flat acrylic ones that look like boiled sweets), the ones we sell are made from bamboo. It's a fair question to ask why, so here's the honest answer.
It hangs with a bit of authority
This sounds like a small thing, but it's the whole game. A bead curtain only works, as a fly barrier, as a divider, as something that looks good rather than limp, if it has a bit of weight to it.
Very light plastic strings move too freely. They blow about in a draught, tangle at the slightest provocation, and never quite settle into a proper curtain. Bamboo is the opposite. Each tube has enough heft to hang straight, swing through a doorway when you walk past, and drop neatly back into place behind you. From a fly's point of view, that's exactly what you want: a consistent, moving wall it can't make sense of. From your point of view, it's a curtain that behaves itself.
It's about as sustainable as a material gets
Bamboo is, technically, a grass. A very enthusiastic one. Some species put on the better part of a metre a day, and a harvested cane regrows from the same root system without replanting. You don't fell a bamboo plant; you give it a haircut. Compared with hardwood, which takes decades, or plastic, which takes a chemistry set and never really goes away, it's hard to think of a better thing to be making a doorway curtain out of.
It's also naturally light, strong and a little bit flexible, which is why it's been used for scaffolding, furniture and just about everything else across South-East Asia for centuries. A bead curtain is a pretty gentle ask by comparison.
Who actually makes them
This is the part we like best, and it's worth telling properly.
The curtains come from the Cu Chi area, north-west of Ho Chi Minh City. They're put together by farmers, in their own homes, during the off-season when there's nothing in the ground to tend. It's work that fits around the growing calendar and tops up the household income in the quiet months, a genuinely useful thing for a farming family rather than a factory line running flat out.
Once a curtain is strung, it goes to a nearby workshop to be finished, oiled and painted. We've visited, so this isn't a guess: around forty people work there, most of them for many years. It's an established place, open more than thirty years, and like a lot of skilled handwork it has the opposite of a staffing problem at the top and a real one at the bottom, because younger people aren't easy to find for this kind of craft.
A week, five pairs of hands
A single curtain takes about a week to make. Not because anyone's slow, but because the painting is layered and each layer has to dry before the next goes on. Five different people work on one curtain at different stages, so by the time it reaches you it has passed through quite a few hands.
The designs themselves are daubed on by hand with sponges, using non-toxic paint. Designs are drawn up on a computer and sent over, and the workshop does a paint test to see whether it can actually be reproduced by hand on bamboo. Some things that look fine on screen simply don't translate. Feedback comes back, the design is adjusted, and it goes back and forth until there's a working sample everyone's happy with. So the flamingo or the tropical sunset on your back door is the end of a proper little collaboration, not a print run.
So, why bamboo?
Because it hangs properly, it's about the most renewable material you could choose, it takes a hand-painted design like nothing else, and it comes from people we've actually met. It's not the cheapest way to make a bead curtain. It's just the right one.
If you fancy one, the full range of bamboo bead curtains is here: bold hand-painted designs, and a plain natural bamboo if you'd rather keep it quiet. If it's mainly the flies you're trying to beat, the same curtains are gathered as fly screen curtains for doorways. And if you're wondering how on earth you put one up without annoying the landlord, we've covered that in How to hang a bead curtain (even if you're renting).