Jonne Amaya’s jewelry origin story is a bit of an odd tale: She was so deeply in love with her mother’s pearl necklace that when she was allowed to wear it to school one day, the future jewelry designer buried it in the sandbox.
“Unfortunately, that necklace was never to be seen again,” Amaya says.
That desire to hold onto that one piece of jewelry for life haunts Amaya—but it also informs who she has become as a jewelry designer. Her Los Angeles–based eponymous brand is unique in that Amaya centers her work on repurposing a customer’s old jewelry, doing custom design, or slowly adding pieces to her collection.
That singular word—collection—is purposeful as well. Amaya says she doesn’t want to make tons of jewelry collections to where you can’t tell one from another. Instead, she has one drop that she has worked on for years: Walk the Chapel or Elope, a series of engagement and wedding rings.
It’s a long title, but Amaya says that’s kind of the point. People who come to her to create an engagement ring or wedding band may not want a big, traditional wedding. They may want to elope. It’s about creating the kind of moments they want and the kind of jewelry that best fits those moments—all made slowly and with intention.
“I see jewelry as treasures. I’ve seen it that way since I was burying a pearl necklace in a sandbox,” she says with a laugh.
Amaya was born in Mexico City, and her family moved to California when she was a child. She attended high school in Orange County, Calif., around Laguna. She was, in her own words, a terrible student.
“In the middle of 10th grade, I was somehow informed that I was missing credits from ninth grade and was notified that I would either have to go to summer school to make up for it or be held back,” Amaya says. “I ended up deciding to be home-schooled instead and, ultimately, ended up taking a high-school exit exam.”
Her next not-so-glamorous stop? A job at a nearby shoe store.
“Definitely not something I was passionate about, but since I had so much time on my hands from finishing high school, I worked while my friends were at school,” Amaya says.
Some contemplation about what she truly wanted to do for a living brought Amaya back to the times when she worked on jewelry with her grandmothers. They had taught her how jewelry could be melted down, giving her their jewelry as material for her experimentation. Amaya ended up going home to study, attending a jewelry school in Mexico City, Academia de Orfebres, which she says she loved.
“It was three days a week and we were hands-on from the start,” Amaya says. “A good bench jeweler is on the bench daily and is extremely creative and good at problem-solving. I spent enough hours on the bench to understand the art of bench jewelry, but my current jewelers who have been consistent on the bench for decades are the true bench masters.”
Amaya’s first jewelry-industry job was for Vanessa Mooney, whose studio in 2012 was in Eagle Rock, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. About 10 women worked there together, and all of them were paid by the piece.
“We would bead necklaces and move on to the next. It was an interesting place to work and was at the peak of Vanessa Mooney on Instagram,” Amaya recalls. “I asked her at one point if I could design rather than bead, and she went for it.”
The work was draining, Amaya says, so she took a break from jewelry until 2016, when she started working with a larger jewelry brand. That experience making sizable volume of the same jewelry pieces over and over is what inspired Amaya to start her own brand.
“I remember reflecting on how much they sold in bulk,” Amaya says. “I understood how companies like that worked and how more sales was the goal. For me, though, as crazy as it seems, I was passionate about the opposite. I really wanted to understand what being a jeweler meant.
“For me, jewelry shouldn’t be mass-produced or ready to ship. It should be intentionally created and designed,” Amaya says. “I also think it’s OK to evolve with your pieces. If you design something and a few years down the road the line you have evolved, then it’s OK to design that piece once again.”
Top: Jonne Amaya (photos courtesy of Jonne Amaya).
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