The Names I Give Them: Why Every One-of-a-Kind Piece Gets a Name

None of my pieces arrive named. They come off the bench as themselves — a ring, a pendant, a small fact of silver and stone — and then they sit on the corner of the table for a day or two while I work out who they are. This is, I’m told, an inefficient way to run a jewellery business. I do it anyway.

It started as bookkeeping, not poetry. I make one-of-a-kind pieces, and early on I had two boulder opal rings on the bench at the same time that were, on paper, identical: same metal, same rough size, same week. In my notes they became a muddle. So I stopped writing what they were and started writing what I actually saw — the one like a piece of chocolate cake, the one with the green flash in the corner. Suddenly I could tell them apart at a glance. The names were never a marketing idea. They were a filing system that happened to have a heart.

Some pieces name themselves the moment the stone goes into the silver. Firestorm announced itself — there was no other word for what the opal was doing. Aurora Dreams arrived the same way. Others take longer. A piece will sit unnamed for a week while I wait for it to tell me what it is, and now and then I get it wrong and have to change it later, the way you sometimes call a person by the wrong name until their real one finally arrives.

People occasionally ask why I don’t just use SKUs — a code, a number, a system that a computer would prefer. The honest answer is that a code is the right label for a product that exists in a row of identical products, and nothing I make exists in a row. Each piece is made once. It will be worn by one person and then, in all likelihood, kept for a very long time. A thing like that should cross the short distance from my bench to your hand with a name, not a number.

There’s a quieter reason too. When you wear something I’ve made, you’re carrying its name even if you never learn it. Somewhere in my notes there is a line that pairs that name with the day it was finished, and — once it finds you — with you. I find that a lovely thing to know is out there: a small private record that says this one was always going to be yours.

If you’d like to know the name of a piece you’re wearing, ask me. I remember all of them. And if you’re ever at Paddington Markets on a Saturday, come and meet a tableful of the not-yet-named. Some of them are still waiting to be told who they are.