Press Room

A pair of hands, a workbench, since 2010.

I'm silversmith Emmanouela Alevizopoulou. I work silver in my workshop in Greece, together with my team, since 2010.

Every piece passes through my hands: the finish, the shape and the weight, the comfort of wearing it for hours. The hammer marks differ from piece to piece, and that's the point.

I started at seventeen, apprenticing in one of the oldest and most traditional silversmithing and goldsmithing workshops in Greece, while also studying at the OAED School of Silversmithing/Goldsmithing — four years, with my diploma coming at twenty-one. In 2010, with the help of a small grant from the Greek public employment organisation (OAED), I opened my own workshop in a small town and released my first collection: the same organisation that had trained me also gave me my first push. It was the year Greece was entering the crisis — most were closing, I was opening.

In November 2011 I did something that felt enormous to me at the time: I registered my name on the Greek internet. There was no online shop yet, not a single online order — there was only the decision that whatever I made would carry my name and be my own, and that I would sign it myself. It was the dream of a young craftswoman: to build something that would last and have a name. Her own.

The following year, 2012, I opened my first online shop. Since then I’ve sold directly, without intermediaries — from my own shop and my own shops on Etsy and Amazon. Perhaps that’s why my jewellery has travelled to almost every corner of the earth, while fewer people know me in Greece than one might expect.

Along the way, I’ve had the good fortune to hire and work alongside other experienced and well-known craftspeople, and I sometimes commission outside help when volume calls for it. Many of them are considerably older than me; I still learn from them. At a time when the market is filling with mass-produced and fast-fashion jewellery, I insist on the handcrafted. I’m also a mother — the workshop has grown alongside my family.

— Emmanouela