Hello, reader, and welcome to our new blog! Over the past couple of years since I started the brand I’ve come across a lot of questions and misconceptions about how our pieces are made. I finally decided that a blog would be a great place to address them and to go more in depth on the different aspects of creating our jewelry.
If you’ve been following our work for some time or have just discovered our jewelry, you’ll know that our pieces are all handcrafted in the Philippines. In the island of Cebu, to be exact. Cebu is known for its lush beaches and for being the design capital of the country. A lot of the country’s leading furniture and design companies are based here, earning Cebu the title of the “Milan of Asia”.
Before launching the brand, I studied interior design at university and worked as a furniture designer before taking my masters in actual Milan. I’d always been drawn to the production aspect of furniture design and loved the times when I’d be assigned to look over production at the factory of the furniture company I used to work for. It was there that I first encountered traditional Filipino furniture-making and, of course, shell inlay.
To give you a quick idea of the amount of work it entails, take a look at this video of the making of one of the pieces from our upcoming Pintados collection:
That, in a nutshell, is what Philippine craftsmanship is all about. It’s incredibly labor-intensive and requires an amount of skill that takes years to develop. Craftsmen pay strict attention to detail and have a keen understanding of the materials they’re working with.
I’ll go more into detail about traditional Cebuano shell inlay in a future post, but for now, welcome to the world of Philippine artistry!
- Susanne