I've been designing jewelry a long time. Long enough to know that most people come to me with the wrong question already formed in their heads.
They come in thinking about an occasion. A milestone. What they're supposed to want for a birthday, an anniversary, a retirement. They've already done the work of deciding what makes sense. What's appropriate. What fits the moment without being too much or too little or too anything.
And I listen to all of it. I do. But that's not where I start.
The first thing I ask is: What brings you joy?
Not what's your favorite color. Not what's your budget. Not what metal do you prefer. I ask what brings you joy — and I watch what happens to their face when they answer.
Because that's where the jewelry lives. Not in the occasion. Not in what makes sense. In that unguarded moment when someone stops performing what they're supposed to want and just tells me the truth.
Most people have never been asked that question in the context of jewelry. They've been asked what they like. They've been shown options and asked to choose. They've been steered — gently, professionally, with the best intentions — toward what's available, what's selling, what someone else decided was beautiful this season.
Nobody asks what brings you joy.
So when I ask it, there's usually a pause. A real one. The kind where you can see someone actually going somewhere inside themselves to find the answer. And what comes back is almost never what I expected.
A woman once told me she loves the way light looks on water in the early morning. That's it. That was the whole answer. She didn't say turquoise or blue or anything a color chart would recognize. She said early morning light on water and I knew exactly what to make her.
Someone else told me she thinks about the color of the earth in the part of Georgia where she grew up. She hadn't been back in thirty years but she carried that color everywhere she went. She didn't even realize she was describing a color until I reflected it back to her. I made her something she could wear every day that held that place on her wrist.
Another woman told me she wanted something that felt like confidence. Not that looked like confidence — that felt like it. She was going through a transition in her life that she wasn't ready to talk about in detail and she wanted something to wear that would remind her of who she was becoming. That conversation took a long time. And the jewelry we made together was nothing like what she came in thinking she wanted.
This is what I mean when I say I listen for what's beneath what people say. The stated request is rarely the whole story. Sometimes it's not even the real story. My job — the part I take most seriously — is to hear what someone is actually carrying and understand what they want the jewelry to hold for them.
I also make jewelry for my ready to wear collections. Work I design for myself first — driven by color stories that won't leave me alone, by combinations of stones that feel necessary before I fully understand why. I lay them out on my design table and something starts talking and I follow it. When a collection comes together it's because I loved it first. Because I needed to make it. I put it out into the world trusting that the woman it was made for will recognize herself in it.
I love that work. It keeps me in honest conversation with color in a way that feeds everything else I do.
But there's something I'll say plainly.
When I design for a collection, I am designing for myself and hoping — genuinely hoping — that my customers will love what I've created too. That hope is real. And when someone finds a design from a collection and it lands for them the way it landed for me when I made it, that is its own kind of joy.
Custom design is a different conversation entirely.
When I finish something I've made for a specific person — when I've heard their joy, held their color, spent hours in the studio in conversation with stones that were chosen entirely for them — finishing it feels different from anything else I do. There's no waiting for the right person to find it. The right person is already in the picture. The work was made to close a loop that was already open.
I think about the moment they'll see it for the first time. Whether it will land the way I understood it should. Whether the color will speak the way they needed it to. I've been doing this long enough to know that moment usually goes the way I hoped. Not because I'm always right but because when you've actually listened — really listened — the work tends to be true.
That truth is the whole point.
I don't sketch until I've heard it. Until I understand what someone is actually carrying. The design table, the stones, the hours of work that come after — all of that is in service of that first honest answer.
This is why I've never been able to just make things and put them out and hope someone finds them meaningful. Some designers can. I genuinely respect that. I can't. The most satisfying thing I do is make something that belongs entirely to one person and could not belong to anyone else.
If you've been thinking about a custom design and you're not sure where to start — that's exactly where we start. With what brings you joy. Everything else follows from there. The color, the form, the stones, the feeling the finished jewelry will carry every time you put it on.
You can find out how the process works and reach out to begin a conversation here: julredesigns.com/pages/custom-jewelry