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Meet the Woman Behind J-Lo’s Famous Bling Cups

It’s been a busy week for Teneka Moore, owner of TaylorMade Bling in St. Louis, MO. Her phone’s been vibrating nonstop. Her Instagram is being inundated with DMs. And her website crashed – twice. Why? Blame J-Lo and the Super Bowl.

Jennifer Lopez – who performed during the halftime show with Shakira – was featured in a Michael Bay-directed commercial for the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. The ad’s action-packed premise involves a mysterious window-washer swiping the star’s ever-present bling cup, and Lopez chasing the thief through the casino to retrieve her prized possession.

That Swarovski-studded tumbler, along with many others, was created by Moore, who specializes in bespoke bling. “J-Lo had a whole commercial themed around the cup,” Moore gushes. “I couldn’t have dreamed that something like that would happen back when I first started the business.”

Teneka Moore

Teneka Moore, owner of TaylorMade Bling

TaylorMade Bling has been around for almost eight years, but Moore’s business relationship with Lopez didn’t begin until three years ago when Moore received an inquiry from Lopez’s manicurist, who wanted to give the entertainer a bling cup as a birthday gift. Moore took the job eagerly, but assumed the gift would ultimately be relegated to the back of a closet and forgotten. That’s not exactly what ended up happening: “I shipped the cup and two days later, J-Lo was all over social media and magazines with this cup,” Moore says. “I just couldn’t believe it.”

Jennifer Lopez with bling cup

Jennifer Lopez shows off her bling cup from TaylorMade Bling, created to mark her Superbowl halftime show.

Now, Lopez will order a new custom bling cup to match whatever project she’s working on. “Anything you can think of she’ll order a cup to commemorate what she’s doing,” Moore says. Based on the number of themed bling cups TaylorMade has sent her, “J-Lo is the hardest working woman in Hollywood.”

Bling cups have become Moore’s most sought-after product, but when she started her company, that idea wasn’t even on her radar. The idea for TaylorMade Bling was born shortly after Moore’s daughter, Taylor, in August 2012. The new mom wanted to incorporate bling-covered pacifiers and baby bottles into a photoshoot she’d scheduled, but because she procrastinated on shopping, Moore ended up just making the items herself. The photographer and other patrons at the studio were all impressed with her homemade baby bling, and soon after orders started rolling in.

Moore has also added custom bling to tennis shoes, liquor bottles and other items, but after a random client asked for a Starbucks tumbler to be blinged out, “It’s been cups ever since.”

All of Moore’s products are decorated by hand “one stone at a time.” It takes about a day and half to create one cup from prep to dry time, she says. As of now, she doesn’t have any plans to automate that process, though she does have one assistant to help shoulder the workload. “We’ve been approached by a lot of larger companies that want to mass-produce the cups, but it’s just not what we’re looking to do right now,” Moore says. “We really like the fact that we’re so into the details and its’s customized all your own way.”

Moore believes the enduring popularity of bling is self-evident: “People like shiny things.”