Chapter 5: Nobody Ever Asks That Question
Jewelry has been my world for a long time. The longer I do this, the more clearly I see that most people come to me with the wrong question already formed in their heads.
They come in thinking about an occasion. A milestone. What they're supposed to want for a birthday, an anniversary, a retirement. They've already done the work of deciding what makes sense. What's appropriate. What fits the moment without being too much or too little or too anything.
And I listen to all of it. I do. But that's not where I start.
The first thing I ask is: What brings you joy?
Not what's your favorite color. Not what's your budget. Not what metal do you prefer. What brings you joy — and I watch what happens to their face when they answer.
Because that's where the jewelry lives. Not in the occasion. Not in what makes sense. In that unguarded moment when someone stops performing what they're supposed to want and just tells me the truth.
Most people have never been asked that question in the context of jewelry. They've been asked what they like. They've been shown options and asked to choose. They've been steered — gently, professionally, with the best intentions — toward what's available, what's selling, what someone else decided was beautiful this season.
Nobody asks what brings you joy.
So when I ask it, there's usually a pause. A real one. The kind where you can see someone actually going somewhere inside themselves to find the answer. And what comes back is almost never what I expected.
One person once told me she loves the way light looks on water in the early morning. That's it. That was the whole answer. She didn't say turquoise or blue or anything a color chart would recognize. She said early morning light on water and I knew exactly what to create for her.
Someone else told me she thinks about the color of the earth in the part of Georgia where she grew up. She hadn't been back in thirty years but she carried that color everywhere she went. She didn't even realize she was describing a color until I reflected it back to her, and what I created for her was something she could wear every day that held that place on her wrist.
Another client told me she wanted something that felt like confidence. Not that looked like confidence — that felt like it. She was going through a transition in her life that she wasn't ready to talk about in detail and she wanted something to wear that would remind her of who she was becoming. That exchange took a long time, and the jewelry we created together was nothing like what she came in thinking she wanted.
This is what I mean when I say I listen for what's beneath what people say. The stated request is rarely the whole story. Sometimes it's not even the real story. My job — the part I take most seriously — is to hear what someone is actually carrying and understand what they want the jewelry to hold for them.
Creating jewelry for my ready to wear collections keeps me in honest conversation with color in a way that feeds everything else I do. Designing for myself first, driven by color stories that won't leave me alone, by combinations of stones that feel necessary before I fully understand why, laying them out on my design table until something shifts and I follow it. When a collection comes together it's because I loved it first, because I needed to create it, and I put it out into the world trusting that the right person will recognize herself in it.
That hope is real. And when someone finds a design from a collection and it lands for them the way it landed for me when I created it, that is its own kind of joy.
Custom design is a different exchange entirely. When I finish something created for a specific person — when I've heard their joy, held their color, spent hours at the design table with stones chosen entirely for them — finishing it feels different from anything else I do. There's no waiting for the right person to find it. The right person is already in the picture, and the design was created to close a loop that was already open.
Thinking ahead to the moment they'll see it for the first time, whether it will land the way I understood it should, whether the color will speak the way they needed it to — long enough at this to know that moment usually goes the way I hoped. Not because I'm always right but because when you've actually listened — really listened — the jewelry tends to be true.
That truth is the whole point. The design table, the stones, the hours that come after — all of it in service of that first honest answer. The most satisfying thing is creating something that belongs entirely to one person and could not belong to anyone else.