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The Materialist : A Podcast from At Present: Daily Summaries Delivered
by At Present
An exploration of material culture with At Present Founder Marc Bridge. Marc is a Materialist. He loves things -- the things artists make, the things we sell, the things we make part of our lives. But he was conflicted. Why do things matter? Why do creative people dedicate their lives to crafting them? What does it mean to obsess about what we buy, wear, and put in our homes? Are we destroying our planet, our children, and ourselves through this obsession? The Materialist Podcast is an exploration of this and so much more. Join us for conversations with the world's best jewelry designers, stylists, influencers, admirers, environmentalists, academics, and a bunch of just interesting people.
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- 1 weeks ago48 min
The Materialist : Deux Amis
Danielle Zdanowski and Devin Zdanowski are husband and wife, business partners, and, before any of that, friends. A year into building a jewelry brand out of their New York apartment, they came on the show to talk about how it started, what they got wrong, and why nobody can predict which piece will sell.At Present Founder Marc Bridge with Deux Amis Founders Danielle Zdanowski and Devin Zdanowski at the Hotel Chelsea, New York City.Deux Amis means “two friends,” and Dani and Devin insist that’s the literal truth of the brand. They are married, they share two goldendoodles and a baby on the way, and they keep going back to Paris so often it’s become a running joke. But underneath all of it, they say, is a friendship. The name, and the collection, came out of those trips: an afternoon at a build-your-own-necklace boutique, a night at the Palais Garnier watching what Parisian women wore to the opera, and then Dani coming home one day with a bag of beads.Neither of them comes from jewelry. Dani runs brand marketing for a footwear company; Devin trained as an engineer. Dani describes the split as roughly 60/40, with her leading design and Devin acting as the checks and balances, the person who tells her how something can actually be made. She admits she doesn’t like hearing no. He admits he’s occasionally the intern, particularly when she tells him a launch can’t move two weeks because of something called the fashion calendar.The first piece was, by their own account, janky: a resin-bead necklace with a little fish charm, the holes drilled by hand, the resin chipping where the drill went in. Dani wore it to the office and spent the next day telling coworkers she’d made it herself. That was the validation. The tassel cord necklace, a black onyx pendant with a silk tassel on a simple cord, was the first thing that sold. The pom-pom necklace, which has been the hero piece since they came to At Present, went through bigger stones, smaller stones, and more than four tassels before it landed where it is now. Devin’s read on it: good form, good function, good balance. Dani’s: just enough, but not too much.We spent a while on materials. Dani only ever wears white, black, or beige, so the collection is built around adding one pop to a minimalist wardrobe without breaking it. That’s how you end up with Dalmatian jasper, a stone defined by its blemishes, sitting next to clean black onyx. Devin points out that no two necklaces are the same anyway. An eight-millimeter bead is never exactly eight millimeters.On price, they were deliberate. Most of the collection lands between roughly $150 and $400, high enough to stay out of fast fashion and low enough to stay out of fine jewelry. Dani’s test is whether she could have afforded it five years ago, and whether someone further along in her career would buy it without a second thought. They rarely see returns, which she takes as a sign the math is working.Asked whether they’ve gotten better at guessing which pieces will sell, both said no. I told them I haven’t either. Devin’s favorite design, the domino earring with jasper and onyx cabochons in a silver bezel, has never taken off. The pom-pom did. That’s the business.The biggest early mistake was thinking they could do everything themselves while holding down two full-time jobs. They’re now hiring their first employee (a family member, which Devin notes keeps it in the family, since family were also the first customers), outsourcing bookkeeping and packaging, and holding the line on one thing: every piece stays handmade and finished by their hands. Growth has been slow by design. Their partners, including At Present and Elyse Walker, all came to them rather than the other way around. They’ve just launched a new collection with grays, a lavender, jade, and jasper, timed to Fashion Week, and are heading into their first real holiday season.Near the end, I asked Dani who the Deux Amis woman is. Her answer was that it isn’t a person so much as a feeling, and then, after some prodding, she landed on Kathleen Kelly from You’ve Got Mail and the essence of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy: late-’90s New York, elevated but grounded, timeless rather than of the moment. Someone who doesn’t want the internet telling her what to wear.Their pick for a brand deserving more attention: Down The Street, an art curation project run by their friends Jamie and Celia.Shop the Deux Amis collection at At Present, and follow them on Instagram at @deuxamis.co. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit atpresent.substack.com
- Aug 13, 202635 min
The Materialist : Erin Sachse Nathan
The designer behind ERINESS talks about getting discovered at 18, finding meaning in ladybugs, balancing creativity with commerce, and building a jewelry brand on her own terms.Erin Sachse Nathan never intended to start a jewelry company.She had been making things for as long as she could remember—knitting, building a camera out of wood and a drawer, and, beginning in seventh grade, making jewelry by hand. It was simply what she did: a way to work with her hands and create objects that made people happy.Then, at 18, while working at Fred Segal before starting college, a jewelry buyer noticed one of Erin’s handmade bracelets.The buyer asked Erin to make one for her and offered a deal: if she received ten compliments while wearing it, she would carry the bracelets at Fred Segal. The next day, she got her ten compliments—and asked Erin for her brand name and wholesale prices.Erin had neither.“I was like, ‘What’s wholesale?’” she remembers.That unexpected encounter became the beginning of ERINESS. Erin spent the money she earned working at Fred Segal on gemstones and began producing wire-wrapped “daisy chains”—delicate hand chains made by wrapping individual beads in wire. Fred Segal became her first retailer. By the time she graduated from college, she was selling through roughly ten stores, filling reorders between exams and occasionally selling jewelry directly off her body to people who stopped her on the street.There was no grand business plan behind it. The jewelry worked because it was unmistakably hers.“I think because it was so authentic to who I am and who I was at the time, people really gravitated toward it,” she says.From a Side Project to a Fine-Jewelry BrandAs graduation approached and Erin’s friends began accepting conventional jobs, she faced a decision: treat the business as a college side project or find out what it could become.“This is the time to try it,” she decided.She returned to Los Angeles, found an office near the Jewelry District and began searching for production partners. Using everything she had earned from her gemstone jewelry, she financed the transition into fine jewelry herself.ERINESS has remained self-funded ever since.That independence has shaped Erin’s approach to growth. She is ambitious, but uninterested in building at the expense of the life—or the company—she wants to have.“My motto has always been slow and steady,” she says. “I don’t need to be the biggest brand in the world. I want to be my brand.”For Erin, thoughtful growth means being ready when an important retailer comes calling, rather than chasing distribution before the company can support it. It means finding exceptional production, protecting the quality of the work and surrounding herself with people who are better than she is at the parts of the business that do not come naturally to her.Her mind is most at home with the next collection: the colors, gemstones, drawings and campaign imagery. Pricing models and operational spreadsheets are necessary, but they are not where she wants to spend her creative energy.That division is one of the central tensions of building an independent brand. Vision may give a company its reason to exist, but execution determines whether it survives. The jewelry still has to be priced correctly, produced beautifully and delivered when promised.Erin has learned to let other people help carry that responsibility.The Collection That Changed EverythingThe emotional center of ERINESS can be found in its Ladybug Collection.While Erin’s mother was in hospice, Erin dreamed that her room was filled with ladybugs. The dream felt comforting rather than frightening. The following day, while sitting with her mother, Erin received a news alert reporting that an enormous swarm of ladybugs had flown over Los Angeles the previous night.That evening, she went home and drew an entire collection.“It was like someone took over my hand,” she says.Erin initially doubted that anyone would want to wear ladybug jewelry. Instead, the collection sold immediately—and customers began sharing their own stories. For many, ladybugs represented a mother, grandmother, grandfather or another loved one who had died.The collection revealed something fundamental about jewelry: its meaning does not end with the designer. Once a piece leaves the studio, its owner gives it a new history.“You know where you got that ring,” Erin says. “You know who gave you those earrings. You know, when you bought that necklace, what you were going through in your life.”The Ladybug Collection helped establish a deeper creative language for ERINESS. The jewelry could be j
- Jul 30, 202656 min
The Materialist : Lauren Sherman
Lauren Sherman, of Puck and The Fashion People podcast, knows exactly how the fashion trick works. She understands the margins, the mythology and the machinery that turns a jacket into an object of desire. Amazingly, the trick still works on her.The most recent object to break through her professional defenses was a Chanel jacket from Matthieu Blazy’s first collection. Lauren wanted it since she saw it on the runway. When she finally tried it on, it connected her to the 13-year-old in Pittsburgh who dreamed of becoming a fashion journalist and covering the shows in Paris.“That jacket is what I imagined I would wear if I was a fashion journalist as a grownup,” she tells me.It wasn’t just a jacket. It was proof that she had become the person she once imagined wearing it.Lauren’s fashion education started early. Her parents met while working at a denim store in Columbus, where they also served as buyers. Her mother loved Halston and Calvin Klein; both parents loved Ralph Lauren. Lauren remembers staging photographs of herself in a leotard and red tights, what she wore on the first day of first grade and the exact color combinations that excited her as a child.Brands entered the picture almost as quickly. Lauren grew up without much money and remembers her mother declaring that the Gap was too expensive, even though a similar outfit from TJ Maxx might have cost just as much. In high school, she bought a fake Kate Spade bag on eBay before anyone around her knew what Kate Spade was. She ordered clothes from the J.Crew catalog and arrived at school in a sweater and tweed cargo pants, prompting her classmates to tell her she looked like she was in college.Long before she wrote about the business of fashion, Lauren understood that clothes could make you appear older, richer, cooler—or simply like someone who knew something other people didn’t.After college, she moved to London to work for Quintessentially, the concierge service for the extremely wealthy. There, she encountered a class system far more explicit than the American version. Money could buy the country house and the impossible restaurant reservation, but it could not fix the wrong accent. At the same time, some of the richest people she met wore inexpensive clothes. As I put it, theirs was the world of a 19-pound shirt and a 19,000-acre estate.Seeing how luxury worked from the inside did not cure Lauren of wanting things. If anything, it made her numb to extraordinary prices. She knows buying a Chanel jacket is a slightly crazy thing to do, but she can also make the case: adjust the price for inflation, buy only a few things each year and keep them forever. Voilà—practically responsible.What knowledge has changed is her threshold. She still loves shopping, but she wants fewer, better things: the perfect sandal, the perfect button-down, the perfect black dress.Her disinterest in fast fashion is not, she readily admits, primarily an ethical position. Once you understand how many copies of something exist, it becomes less exciting. Seeing the machinery has not eliminated her materialism. It has simply made the machinery work harder.So what separates a beautiful construct from a con?“It is all a con,” Lauren says, before arriving at a more useful distinction. The enduring brands tend to be built by people who are also under fashion’s spell. The designers and executives are not merely fooling the customer; they believe in the creativity and fantasy themselves. When something is manufactured simply because a spreadsheet says there is demand, consumers can usually feel it.The magic requires talent, hard work, timing and a product strong enough to carry the story.Charvet is Lauren’s favorite example. The mythology is excellent: a discreet Parisian shirtmaker on Place Vendôme, established in the nineteenth century and supposedly uninterested in marketing—which is, of course, the best marketing imaginable.But the shirts also deliver. Lauren loves the way the fabric falls, the way they fit and how easily she can throw one over almost anything. At around 400 euros, a Charvet shirt is objectively expensive. But beside the $1,000 shirts sold by designer brands in department stores, it begins to look almost sensible.This is what Lauren calls the “price-value equation”: not whether something is cheap, but whether it gives you enough for what it costs. Charvet’s colors, fabrics, history and French production all add to that equation. The occasional imperfection does not bother her. Human beings made the shirts; they are not supposed to emerge from a laboratory.The online quality police may count loose threads. Lauren
- Jun 17, 202645 min
The Materialist : Ivette Stephanopoulos
For this episode of The Materialist, host Marc Bridge sits down with Ivette Stephanopoulos — a 25-year jewelry industry veteran whose career has spanned nearly every corner of the business, from retail and GIA to De Beers, Tiffany, and David Yurman. Recorded on location at the Las Vegas shows, often described as the industry’s “Super Bowl,” the conversation moves from the emotional power of an engagement ring to the unresolved tension between natural and lab-grown diamonds, and from the rise of high jewelry to why so few American brands have built lasting design-driven followings.A Career Built on Connection, Not BirthrightUnlike many in the trade, Stephanopoulos didn’t grow up in a jewelry family — she fell into the industry through an early job at a small New York retailer. What kept her in it, she says, is that jewelry is fundamentally a “happy industry”: every transaction sits at the center of someone’s milestone, whether an engagement, an anniversary, or a personal celebration. Looking back across her stops at GIA, De Beers, Tiffany, and David Yurman, she describes each chapter as building on the last, deepening her understanding of where a piece of jewelry actually comes from — the mines, the communities, the artisans — before it ever reaches a customer’s hand.Why a Diamond, and Not a Trip to Jamaica?Bridge presses on a deceptively simple question: why do diamonds, specifically, carry the emotional weight of a marriage proposal? Stephanopoulos points to rarity, durability, and tradition — a diamond is something a couple can own forever, pass down, and point to as a tangible marker of a “first large purchase” early in a relationship. That sense of permanence, she argues, is what transforms a transaction into an investment in the relationship itself.The Natural vs. Lab-Grown DivideThe conversation’s most pointed exchange concerns lab-grown diamonds. Stephanopoulos is candid that the natural diamond industry has spent the last decade-plus on the defensive, and that this defensiveness has come at a cost: by failing to proactively educate consumers, the industry ceded significant market share to lab-grown alternatives, which she notes are also more profitable for many retailers — creating little incentive to fully return. Her prediction is one of coexistence rather than reversal: natural diamonds won’t reclaim their former market position, but they’ll retain a smaller, devoted base of buyers who value provenance and rarity. Notably, she points out that virtually no major high jewelry house works with lab-grown stones — at the top of the market, natural and untreated remains the standard.High Jewelry, Status, and the Idea of “Important”The two also unpack what separates “high jewelry” from the rest of the market — generally pieces priced at $50,000 and above, often built around rare or one-of-a-kind gemstones. Stephanopoulos describes the purchase process for this tier as an experience rather than a sale: brands cultivate a sense of exclusivity and storytelling — introducing the mine, the artisan, the designer — so that price becomes almost an afterthought. She draws a sharp distinction between something “expensive” and something “important,” arguing that importance is usually personal or sentimental rather than intrinsic to the object itself, while in auction-house language, “important” is often simply a polite synonym for rare.The Real Problem Isn’t Materials — It’s StorytellingA recurring theme is Bridge’s hypothesis that the jewelry industry has been held back not by debates over diamonds or fluctuating gold and silver prices, but by a persistent failure of storytelling and creativity. Stephanopoulos agrees, pointing to David Yurman as the rare counterexample: an American brand built almost entirely on design and narrative — the love story between Mr. and Mrs. Yurman, an accessible entry price point, and a broad demographic reach — rather than on metal content or carat weight. Bridge critiques the industry’s habit of leading with material specifications (”it’s 18 karat”) instead of meaning, arguing that materials should justify a price point, not serve as the selling point itself.Giving Back: The Armenian Jewelers AssociationStephanopoulos also discusses her role as president of the Armenian Jewelers Association, a global organization connecting the disproportionately large Armenian presence across the jewelry trade — from major houses to independent ateliers. The association’s mission includes showcasing emerging Armenian designers at shows like JCK and Gem Geneva, and exploring manufacturing partnerships with Armenia itself, where favorable export tariffs and strong craftsmanship traditions create real opportunity.
- Jun 3, 202643 min
The Materialist : Rob Bates
This episode of The Materialist is a little different.Usually, we talk with designers, tastemakers, collectors, and creators about the objects they love: the jewelry they wear, the pieces they make, the things they choose to bring into their lives. This conversation is about jewelry, but it is not really about looking at jewelry. In fact, Rob Bates says at one point, “I don’t really like looking at jewelry. It has no interest to me. And I’ve written about jewelry for 35 years.”That may be the perfect way into Rob’s particular genius.For decades, Rob has been one of the defining journalistic voices of the jewelry industry. As longtime news editor of JCK, and before that at National Jeweler, he has covered diamonds, retailers, trade shows, controversies, crises, consolidations, family businesses, lab-grown diamonds, conflict diamonds, tariffs, marketing campaigns, and all the strange, intimate, global machinery that sits behind a ring in a case.What has kept him interested is not jewelry as decoration, but jewelry as a window into how the world works. From Rob’s perspective, the industry is a small town and a global system at once: family businesses and multinational companies, romance and commerce, ethics and marketing, gemstones and geopolitics. It touches “so many people, so many countries, so many lives,” as he puts it. Jewelry, in Rob’s telling, is not merely an accessory category. It is an industry where questions of value, truth, labor, status, love, responsibility, and storytelling all collide.That journalistic distance makes this a different kind of Materialist episode. Rob is not especially interested in whether a piece is pretty. He is interested in what it reveals. A diamond is never just a diamond. It is a product, a symbol, a commodity, a brand, a promise, a controversy, a livelihood, and sometimes a problem. The same object can represent romance in one context, extraction in another, national development in another, and market disruption in yet another.Much of the conversation circles around lab-grown diamonds, which Rob identifies as the biggest issue facing the industry today. His analysis is characteristically unsentimental: lab-grown diamonds succeeded not because they invented a radically new use case, but because they inserted themselves into an existing emotional and commercial structure. The mined diamond industry had spent decades building demand. Lab-grown companies arrived and said, in effect: this is the same thing, only cheaper. And, as Rob says, “nothing beats cheaper.”But Rob is also clear that the conflict between natural and lab-grown diamonds has become less productive than it should be. The two sides “take shots at each other constantly,” even though “both things can coexist.” His deeper critique is that the diamond industry trained consumers to compare numbers and letters rather than meaning, beauty, design, or brand. Once diamonds became a grid of specifications, it became easier for consumers to comparison shop — and easier for lab-grown diamonds to compete on price.That idea opens into one of the richer themes of the episode: what makes something “real”? Rob’s novels have returned to that question, and the jewelry industry seems almost designed to keep asking it. Is a lab-grown diamond real? Is a mined diamond more meaningful because it came from the earth? Is value created by scarcity, cost, emotion, advertising, history, or use? Rob does not pretend to resolve all of this neatly. “Everything is real,” he says. What matters, in the end, may be the human impact: what kind of person you are, what effect you have on your family, and what effect you have on other people.The conversation also turns to the moral complexity of diamonds. Rob notes that diamonds have been associated with terrible things, but also that, at their best, they have provided jobs and helped build prosperity in places like Botswana and Namibia. We talk about visiting the Jwaneng mine in Botswana — a vast open pit that is impossible to romanticize as a physical scar on the earth, but also impossible to dismiss when you consider the education, healthcare, infrastructure, and democratic stability supported by what came out of that ground. The bumper-sticker version of the story does not work. The real story is harder, more compromised, and more interesting.The second half of the episode shifts from jewelry to journalism — and to Rob’s own entrepreneurial leap.After 28 years at JCK and more than five years at National Jeweler, Rob recently launched The Jewelry Wire, an independent Substack. It is a striking career move: a veteran journalist leaving the security and infrastructure of established trade media to build something in his own voice. He describes the decision with a mix of humor, anxiety, freedom, and disbelief. At nearly 60, he felt that if he was going to
- Apr 2, 202637 min
The Materialist : Spicy Dan
Marc Bridge and Danielle Meyer, The Dominick Hotel, NYC, March 27, 2026What happens when a brand is built not from strategy decks or heritage training, but from instinct, speed, and a refusal to wait for permission?In this conversation, Danielle Meyer of Spicy Dan shares how her business has grown out of pure creative impulse—designing pieces she wants to exist, then refining them through real-time feedback from her community. The result is a brand that sits in a rare space: playful but intentional, accessible but aspirational, and deeply personal without feeling precious.We explore the tension between creativity and commerce—why customization works when most brands fail to execute it, how rapid production cycles clash with traditional wholesale timelines, and why her best-selling instincts often contradict her personal taste. Danielle is refreshingly honest about the realities of building a business: procrastinating the unglamorous work, learning by doing, and embracing imperfection as a growth strategy.At its core, Spicy Dan is less about jewelry and more about world-building—a distinct point of view that customers can step into, whether they’re buying their first piece or their fifteenth. It’s a reminder that in a category where differentiation is notoriously difficult, originality often comes not from invention, but from conviction. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit atpresent.substack.com
- Feb 26, 20261h 6m
The Materialist : Malaika Crawford
A conversation with Malaika Crawford on flex culture, gatekeeping, and why print still matters.There’s a moment in my conversation with Malaika Crawford—Editorial Director of Hodinkee Magazine, former fashion-world operator (Mel Ottenberg’s assistant in the Rihanna heyday), and current resident anthropologist of the watch internet—where she says the quiet part out loud:“Watches are like jewelry with logos. Period.”It lands because it’s true… and because so much of watch culture is built around pretending it isn’t.This episode is about that tension: watches as craft and watches as status signal, watches as “timeless” objects we tell ourselves we’ll pass down, and watches as the most socially acceptable way to peacock at a dinner table without tossing your car keys down like a cartoon villain.It’s also about something else I love: what happens when an outsider walks into a closed room and names what everyone’s been politely not naming.Who is Malaika Crawford?Malaika comes from the fashion pressure-cooker—shoots, sourcing, customs nightmares, Met Gala-level stakes—and then, through a pandemic-era twist (and a very specific Deepak Chopra “look for a sign” meditation), she finds herself being pulled into watches. Not just collecting, but writing, shaping, and expanding the editorial voice of the most influential watch media brand in the U.S.She didn’t arrive to quietly follow the playbook. She arrived and asked, essentially: why is this hobby acting like a gated institution?The watch world’s fragile egoEarly on, Malaika took heat for writing about watches through a style lens—shooting watches on models, talking about context, clothing, culture. It wasn’t that she wasn’t doing the research. It was that she was threatening the hierarchy.She puts it plainly: a lot of the backlash wasn’t about movements and calibers. It was about who was “allowed” to speak.“A lot of them have a very narrow view of what their hobby should be—and who should be allowed inside their hobby.”And there’s a key distinction she makes that I think explains 80% of watch internet:Collectors vs. enthusiasts.The real collectors—the people with serious, historic, museum-grade collections—are often private. The loudest outrage, on the other hand, tends to come from “the cheap seats.” People emotionally invested in the identity of the thing, whether or not they’re actually buying the thing.Watches as flex culture (and why that’s uncomfortable)Here’s the provocation at the center of the episode:“Most of the time, when you’re buying a Rolex or Patek or AP… you want people to know.”Not everyone. Not always. But culturally? The signal is a feature, not a bug.And watches have the perfect cover story:“Watches have a functional alibi.”You can roll up your sleeve and show the world exactly what you’re wearing while pretending it’s just… timekeeping. That’s why they’ve become, arguably, the most elegant status object on earth. It’s also why people get defensive when someone names it.Because once you say “this is a flex,” the wearer has to ask: what am I trying to say about myself?Why watch design gets stuckOne of Malaika’s most interesting points is structural: watches are engineered first, designed second.In fashion, the creative director is the figurehead and the vision leads. In watches, the movement often dictates the case, and brand “heritage” becomes both asset and shackle.So you get a stalemate:* consumers want the watch that signals the brand* brands want to modernize without losing the totem* enthusiasts want the “old rules” preserved* culture keeps moving anywayWhich helps explain why the “jeans” of watches—Tank, Submariner, Speedmaster—remain dominant. The market rewards recognizability and permanence.The early-2000s era: the most honest watch momentMalaika calls the early 2000s her favorite era from the “Jane Goodall chair.” Oversized everything. Bottle service. Wrapped cars. Murakami Vuitton bags. Watches became loud.Panerai. Big Bang. Offshore. Jacob & Co.Not subtle. Not apologizing.And she argues something I love: watches may be old-fashioned objects, but they’re reflections of the culture that produced them. The early 2000s watches make perfect sense… because the early 2000s were perfect nonsense.The Travis Scott problem (and what it revealed)When Audemars Piguet collaborated with Travis Scott, watch internet lost its mind. Malaika wrote a long piece calling out what she sa
- Dec 30, 202557 min
The Materialist : Monica Stephenson
Marc Bridge and Monica Stephenson, Anza Gems Worldwide Headquarters, Seattle, WAMonica Stephenson is the kind of guest who makes you see a familiar object—one you might already love—like it’s brand new. In this episode of The Materialist, we sit together in her Seattle office overlooking Lake Union and the skyline, and we follow a thread that runs from the jewelry counter in a Midwest college town all the way to artisanal gem mines in East Africa—and then back again, into the hands of the designers and collectors who ultimately give these stones a second life.What unfolds is not just Monica’s career story (though it’s a fantastic one), but a bigger argument about what jewelry can do when it’s treated as both beauty and infrastructure: an object that sparks desire on the surface, and—if you care to go deeper—a vehicle for livelihoods, dignity, and long-term economic power.A retailer’s education: why the “floor” mattersMonica’s origin story is refreshingly unromantic in the best way: she starts in retail in the early 1990s, selling jewelry while studying art history and fine art at the University of Iowa. That experience, she argues, isn’t a detour—it’s the foundation. Retail trains you to listen, to understand what customers actually respond to, and to translate a piece of jewelry into a reason someone chooses to bring it into their life.It’s also where she first feels the pull of what she calls the “small sculpture” quality of jewelry—the idea that a piece can be materially precious, artistically rigorous, and emotionally immediate all at once. She remembers being captivated by the intention and artistry of emerging designers, a shift away from mass-manufactured sameness toward jewelry with a point of view. You flip a bracelet over, she says, and it’s as beautiful on the underside as it is on the top—craft as moral clarity.There’s a personal echo too: Monica didn’t grow up in a jewelry family in the classic sense, but her father worked outside sales for a New York designer and would have merchandise spread across the kitchen table. So the objects were always there—close enough to normalize, just far enough away to remain slightly magical.And then she says something that is both funny and true: we’re all magpies on some level. We like the shiny things. But for Monica, the “bug” goes deeper than sparkle. It’s the entire ecosystem—materials, workmanship, makers, and the people who carry the knowledge. It’s a love affair with process.Tech, jewelry, and the limits of a “flat detail page”From the jewelry counter, Monica’s path bends into the early internet. In the late 1990s she buys the domain for a diamond referral concept and builds what amounts to a matchmaking site connecting consumers to local retailers. It’s an early clue of what becomes a recurring theme in her work: jewelry is relational. It moves through networks of trust, story, and access.That blend of jewelry fluency and tech curiosity leads to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Amazon asks her to help launch its jewelry store in 2003. Monica becomes, in her words, “the tech translator to the jewelry industry,” straddling two worlds and learning to speak both languages.What’s especially interesting is her reflection on why Amazon’s vision didn’t fully match the reality. Jewelry can translate to digital—today we have video, richer storytelling, and much better tools for dimensionality and nuance—but at the time, the attempt was to fit a complicated, largely non-branded category into a UPC-driven system. Watches could behave like that. Diamonds and gemstones couldn’t, at least not cleanly. Even within diamonds, there’s real variance from stone to stone, and the effort to “shoehorn” that complexity into a flat product page was harder than it looked.When I ask what she wished the platform could have been, her answer is basically a thesis for modern jewelry commerce: more immersive visuals, more dimensional truth, and more designer storytelling—who made it, why they made it, what the process is, and what’s embedded inside the object beyond its specs. The implication is clear: if you remove story, you remove meaning—and jewelry is meaning-driven.I Dazzle: the closet years and the power of deep storytellingAfter Amazon, Monica steps back for family life, has two daughters, and then—like a lot of high-functioning creatives—hits the point where being “only” a parent isn’t enough for her brain. She needs a creative outlet that isn’t organized around snack time.That’s where I Dazzle returns, this time as a blog. She subscribes to the industry magazines again, starts writing, and—nudged by her husband—channels her ideas into WordPress. What follows is the kind of grassroots editorial work that, in hindsight, feels inevitable: she travels to studios, interviews designers, attends trade shows, reports on tr
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About The Materialist : A Podcast from At Present
An exploration of material culture with At Present Founder Marc Bridge. Marc is a Materialist. He loves things -- the things artists make, the things we sell, the things we make part of our lives. But he was conflicted. Why do things matter? Why do creative people dedicate their lives to crafting them? What does it mean to obsess about what we buy, wear, and put in our homes? Are we destroying our planet, our children, and ourselves through this obsession? The Materialist Podcast is an exploration of this and so much more. Join us for conversations with the world's best jewelry designers, stylists, influencers, admirers, environmentalists, academics, and a bunch of just interesting people.
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