I quit my job as a family therapist because of a low-cut blouse.

My boss had opinions about it. I was tired of being told how to dress, what I was worth, and how to spend my time. So I left, and I moved to Thailand for a year.

I came by it honestly. My mom left for Europe on her 21st birthday and stayed nine years. Her message never changed: do what makes you happy, answer to no one, and for God’s sake, travel. It wasn’t the advice that got me. It was watching her live it. She forged her own path, and that became the soul of Filosophy.

That was 2009. What followed was fourteen years of travel — Thailand, Argentina, Peru, Indonesia, Mexico, Brazil — finding artisans, learning how they worked, and designing pieces around what they could do. Winters abroad. Summers on the festival circuit.

I opened my first studio in October 2024 and started making Filosophy jewelry in house. What I got back was everything I’d been missing. For years I designed around what was available to the artisans I worked with — their materials, their techniques, their limits. Now I get to choose the stones. Any color, any shape, any cut I can find. Quality I could never get when I was designing in Indonesia.

The stones are the star. I look for unusual color and character rather than uniformity, then build the piece around what the stone gives me — sometimes an everyday necklace, sometimes the piece you put on when you want to be seen.

A single jasper might hold green, yellow, brown, cream, teal and orange all at once. That’s paint on a palette. The piece is the canvas. The art is in what you do with it — graduating the color, or putting it with something unexpected is what makes handmade special. It's not the most cost effective, but nothing good ever was.