The Story Behind The Margarita Necklace

The Necklace That Almost Wasn't

In 2022, I was burnt out. Not the dramatic kind, just the quiet, creeping kind that comes from years of building something with your own two hands. And then, one evening on the Azuero Peninsula in Panama, somewhere along that stretch of coast, where the sun drops straight into the Pacific over Playa Venao, the sky did something it does better there than almost anywhere else in the world.

Purple bled into orange, orange into black, black into a blue green I still can't fully describe. It only lasted a few minutes. But something about that sky rearranged something in me.

The Margarita necklace was the last piece I made for this collection, and I made it almost by accident. It was strung together from the beads that were left over after designing everything else. The scraps. The remainders. I looked at it, thought "nice piece," and put it in a tray. That was it. No fanfare. No grand vision. Just leftovers.

It sat there until my sister Andrea walked into my studio one day and saw it. "I love this one, can I have the sample after you're done?" she asked. "Of course" I replied (there are certain perks of having a jewelry designer sister :)

I didn't believe she wanted it. To me, it was made without much thought. I almost left it out of the shoot entirely. It was only while I was packing up samples, rushing to meet with my favorite photographer Yassell, that I caught it out of the corner of my eye and grabbed it. That photo became the most beautiful image from the entire shoot (and my favorite to this day).

Since then, the Margarita has never left the collection. But it hasn't stayed the same either. Over the years I removed the small spacer beads between the ceramic pieces and replaced them with knots, the way you'd string pearls. The original glaze company that made that specific muted purple shade closed down, and for a ceramist, finding the right purple is no small thing. I searched until I found the prefect shade, a little more vibrant but still worked really well. Fast forward a couple of years, I got a new kiln and finally learned to fire beads with the kind of precision I'd been chasing for years.

So the Margarita you wear today isn't the necklace from that first tray. It's better. It's the version shaped by loss, by scarcity, by practice, by someone else's eyes seeing what I almost missed.

That's the thing about beautiful things. Sometimes they're sitting right in front of you, waiting for someone to notice. Sometimes it takes your sister walking in at the right moment. Sometimes it takes years of practice assembling it to get it right.

The Margarita necklace has been our bestseller for years now. Every strand still holds that sunset over the Azuero coast. Every knot still holds a lesson: great things take time, and sometimes the most beautiful piece you'll ever make is the one you almost didn't notice.