I've been a collector of letter and name jewelry since childhood. It started when my older sister bought me a bracelet for Christmas from the Black Hills Gold Jewelry store that had my name engraved on it. I loved that bracelet, and I loved that store. I had always been enamored with the delicate beauty of their jewelry, oftentimes dainty and ornate, and… how did they manage to get metal that was pastel green and pink? Everything about jewelry fascinated me. How it was made, what each piece meant to the person who wore it, what it said about them, what the story was. But in particular, it was personalized jewelry that I found the most exciting.
At the same time I was falling in love with jewelry, I also started to fall in love with letters. I was learning italic printing in school and teaching myself calligraphy with mom's copy of "Italic Calligraphy & Handwriting" book from Lloyd Reynolds. It all culminated in my love affair with letters and their expressiveness. I love this idea that you could express an infinite amount of style and personality through a single letterform. The uppercase letter A could span from pure simplicity in a san serif form to a spectacularly ornate illuminated letter with endless possibilities in between, but in the end? It's still the letter A.
From then on, if I saw my name in the form of jewelry, or a pendant with an L or a W, I'd scrounge up whatever money I had to buy it if the design resonated with me. Later in life, friends would also buy me letter jewelry as a gift. All of these pieces held so much more meaning to me than most of the other jewelry I owned — I could remember all of the details about it — where I found it, who bought it for me and how it was presented and so on.
Letter jewelry has been around for centuries, and it makes sense as to why this is. Why do we wear jewelry in the first place? Why did our ancestors wear jewelry? For a lot of the same reasons, I think —to express ourselves and our individuality, or to show that we're part of a group, for sentimental reasons, to complete an outfit and ultimately, to tell others the story about who we are.
In 2017, when a friend and fellow font designer gave me a letter pendant for my birthday, we naturally began wondering what font it was. And I started becoming more aware of the broader landscape of letter jewelry, and how so much of it centered on minimal sans serif forms. While elegantly simple, this style represents just one visual voice within a much larger typographic world. I couldn't stop thinking about the vast range of expression and design possibilities that exists within letterforms and how that could be expanded into letter jewelry. I could combine my two passions, for jewelry and letter design.
And so I began this journey. A deeper and different way of working with letterforms, from the two dimensional world of creating letters on paper with brush, pen and pencil and then on screen, digitally to the three dimensional world of metal.
It proved to be far more daunting, time consuming and expensive to do than I could have ever imagined. First I had to learn about how jewelry was made. 3D models, casting, plating… there's so much involved in how jewelry is made. Once I wrapped my head around it, I started researching manufacturing and I ran into a huge financial obstacle.
Initially, all of the manufacturers I contacted required a minimum of 100 pieces per design. That would have been 2,600 pieces for the entire alphabet. I was looking at tens of thousands of dollars to produce a single line of jewelry with no guarantee of any kind of success. Producing pieces as a one-off sample was too expensive to resell. The other option? To produce 100 each of the most common letters to see if it was worthwhile to invest in producing the rest of the line. The five most common letters, A, J, K, M and S comprise almost half of all letter pendants sold, so I could start with that. That's a common approach when producing letter jewelry, to test the market. But, no offense to anyone who does that, but for me? I did not like that idea at all. Nope! I didn't want to leave anyone behind — what if they saw one of my designs and loved it but I didn't have their letter in stock? Q, U, X and Z are the least common initials for first names and guess what? I have friends whose names all begin with those letters. I thought about them and refused to compromise. I'd either stock the entire alphabet or not at all.
This is what stopped me from moving forward with this concept for years. I was caught between financial constraints and what I valued most — offering a complete alphabet. It was discouraging. Especially when my friends and family who knew about this venture and were excited about my idea and the designs and would ask me how it was going… and I had to tell them that I was stuck. There were moments where I wondered if this idea would remain just that — an idea.
However, I didn't give up during those years. I continued to reach out to different manufacturers periodically to see if I could find one that was willing to produce the entire alphabet for me in smaller quantities so that I could afford to produce the entire alphabet in one design. In 2025, much to my great relief (and elation!) I found a company who produced beautiful work agreed to take this project on and instead of a minimum amount of pieces made per design, they agreed to a minimum amount spent per order. And so we began. And I must say, I LOVE these folks. Their customer service, attention to detail, quality control is exceptional.
Each design I've created here on this site originally comes from my own hand, sketching or hand lettering on paper and then becoming digitized. Some collections were adapted from fonts I've designed and some designs were created specifically for this purpose alone. These designs are truly unique and you won't find them anywhere else. And they all express something different, they all have a unique personality about them— just like you.
If you want to learn more about each design, I share that through my Studio Notes page, where you'll find behind the scenes information, from the inspiration of the design and the original sketches. A letter represents your name. But its design expresses who you are. And that's what you'll find here — uniquely expressive letter jewelry that tells your story.
