My mom, who is a hairdresser in Puerto Rico, lost her job after the devastation of Hurricane Maria. The hair salon where she was working for the last 6 years never recovered from the damages. This hurricane left thousands of families without homes and destroyed some communities entirely. We lost an estimated 2,975 American citizens. My mom proved her resilience by bringing clients to her home. Her business was starting to pick up, until COVID-19 lock down, leaving her without a job again.

I decided to move from New York City to San Francisco to accept a job in the fashion industry that would position me in a better financial position to give support to my family in Puerto Rico. However, to my surprise, I ended up quarantined in an unfamiliar city in the middle of a pandemic without the job for which I had originally moved.

My mom and I turned our pain and frustration into something beautiful. Having experienced hardships before, we realized we just needed to pause, breathe, and create a new path for ourselves, leading to our first sustainable soutache and crochet earrings collection.

I consider myself a storyteller. I think we all are, but we just choose different ways to tell our stories. I love to tell stories with words, but sometimes when words are not enough, I find myself creating shapes, textures and combining colors into beautiful fashion pieces. The earrings my mother and I make each have their own story and meaning.

Suddenly our crafting become a small business

After a few pricked fingers, we had our first earring collection. Bold Joy was born from the constant search for reasons to smile during a difficult year and from discoveries and lessons obtained in the process. In the end, the reasons arise from inside and outside sources and the smallest detail or insight has been valuable in the making of each piece. The result has been a collection full of colors, unexpected shapes and textures. We have been inspired by the beauty of nature, valuable memories, magical places and moments of meditation.

Our pieces are a representation of the spirit of the Earth and its elements. No gemstone is identical to another. Our collection was made painstaking, giving attention to each part of the process and focusing on the quality of each piece. As a result, each piece is a feeling unrepeatable in its characteristics.

We believe that a lifestyle based on intuition and inspiration can be essential to regain well-being. The construction of our pieces is part of a continuous meditation process to recognize ourselves as an extension of the Universal energy source. The combination of elements, stones and crystals in the making of our pieces contain a spiritual meaning inside. Each design has a deep transforming power and its archetypal shape awakens harmonious qualities between the body, the emotions, the mind and the spirit.

Healing and restoration is a big part of our mission

As people who experienced the devastation of storms and floods in Puerto Rico and unprecedented wildfires in California as a direct consequence of climate change, we decided we don't want to be part of the problem. We strive to operate our small company with integrity and care in order to make a positive impact in the world. We work hard to source the most sustainable and ethical materials and continuously look to better our business and material sourcing from the jewelry itself to the packaging we ship in. In our creation and sourcing process, we consider the whole production line and everyone involved from start to finish.

We say no to fast fashion

We reject the increase in consumption associated with the low-cost production "Fast Fashion" that has created problems of conservation of natural resources and is highly linked to labor exploitation, extremely low wages and deplorable conditions that mainly affect women and children.100% of our products are made in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City and Puerto Rico. We believe in proximity fashion, the production of our designs is done on demand. Our jewelry pieces are sewn by hand using natural or recycled materials in limited quantities to ensure the highest production standards and to eliminate any excess waste. In this way, we are able to offer exclusive designs, quality of pieces and fair wages that eliminate any gender pay gap. We are engaged with a slow production chain. This is the basis for our values.

We plant trees

We are partnering with reforestation projects and we plant a tree for every jewelry piece sold. We are honored to have reforestation as an integral part of our business model. Eleven percent of all global greenhouse emissions caused by humans are due to deforestation, comparable to the emissions from all of the passenger vehicles on the planet. Nature is an untapped solution. Forests are incredibly effective at storing carbon, providing at least a third of the mitigation action needed to prevent the worst climate change scenarios. Yet nature-based solutions receive only 3% of all climate funding. Natural climate solutions such as restoring degraded forest could create as many as 39 jobs per $1 million invested -that's a job creation rate more than six times higher than oil and gas industry. We care deeply about the planet and creating a business that gives back to nature.

We Use Zero Plastic

Plastic packaging is extremely wasteful and impacts earth's ecosystems, on which we depend. Due to poor product design and lack of political infrastructure, the majority of plastic waste is sent to landfills or disposed of into the environment. 9.2 billion tons of plastic have been produced, of which only 9 percent has been recycled properly. Because plastic isn't biodegradable, every piece of plastic ever made is still on this planet. Whether it breaks down into microplastics or not, plastic that is either dumped or washed into the ocean is consumed by marine animals. Plastic packaging is one of the greatest generators of plastic pollution, for its shortest life-span.

Learning and Cutting 

In the same way we carefully used different scissors to cut and create our designs, we needed to shape our thinking process and cut out old habits to eliminate self-sabotage behaviors and minimize our ecological footprint, which is a measure of how fast we consume resources and generate waste vs how fast the planet recovers from it. After a move from the East to the West Coast, a job loss, a canceled family reunion, a pandemic and another move from San Francisco to Brooklyn, New York, we ended up creating our own sustainable brand. If you constantly search for reasons to smile you will find them.