A few years ago, I realised I had become part of the problem I wanted to solve. That isn’t easy to admit, because at the time I thought I was making the right decisions.
When I first started my jewelry brand, I made everything by hand. As the business grew, I decided to expand my collection with agate jewelry sourced from India. Before I started working with those suppliers, I spent weeks doing research. I asked about wages, working conditions and the workshops where the jewelry was made. I requested photos and tried to understand as much as I possibly could.
On paper, everything seemed fine.
But something never stopped bothering me. No matter how many questions I asked, I realised I would never truly know. The distance between our worlds was simply too big. Maybe everything was exactly as it should be. Maybe it wasn’t. The truth is, I couldn’t say with complete confidence that I knew where every piece came from or exactly how it had been made. That feeling stayed with me…
The strange part was that those collections were actually doing really well. Customers loved them. From the outside, my business looked like it was growing in exactly the way it should. But every time someone placed an order, I felt less connected to what I was selling. I realised I wasn’t proud of growing if I couldn’t fully stand behind every step of the process.
Some of those agate pieces are still part of my collection today. They’re currently on sale because once they’re gone, they won’t return. And if they don’t all find a new home, I’ll carefully reuse the gemstones in my own handmade designs. I don’t like wasting beautiful materials, especially when they can become part of something new.
A little later, life took me to Australia for a few months, where I worked with polo horses. Looking back, I think that trip changed much more than I realised at the time. Being away from my business gave me the space to think. I missed making things with my own hands. I missed sitting at my workbench. I missed creating something from nothing instead of searching for products to sell.
That’s when I knew I wanted to change everything.
When I came home, I promised myself I would keep my supply chain as short as possible. Today, my foundry is in the Netherlands, and I make my own jewelry by hand. Every now and then I still source special gemstones from trusted sellers abroad because some stones simply can’t be found here. But the difference is that my focus has completely shifted. I’m no longer trying to offer more. I’m trying to make better.
That journey also made me think about something we rarely talk about. Everyone knows the term fast fashion, but almost nobody talks about fast jewelry. Maybe we should.
Jewelry is becoming something we consume instead of something we treasure. New collections appear every week. Trends disappear just as quickly. We buy pieces because they’re affordable or because everyone else is wearing them, only to replace them a few months later. Somewhere along the way, jewelry stopped being something we kept for years and became something we simply collected.
Maybe that’s why I work differently today. I don’t want to release endless collections just to keep up with trends. I’d rather spend weeks creating one piece that becomes part of someone’s story than ten pieces they’ll forget by next season.
Sometimes I wonder if people will ever start talking about fast jewelry the same way we now talk about fast fashion. I hope they do. Not because I think we should stop buying jewelry, but because I think jewelry deserves to mean something again.
Maybe that’s a little old-fashioned.
I actually hope it is.
Thanks for reading a page from my journal. See you in the next one. Love, Valerie
