I found these glass spheres and that was basically the end of my productive week. Big, lighter than they have any right to be, and some in a blue that matches our shop wall so closely it felt less like it almost wasn't a coincidence. I brought them to the studio immediately.
When it comes to designing, Billy's the planner. He'll sketch a whole concept out before he touches materials. But I tend to go the other way, I just start making. The first pair of earrings came together almost immediately, and I wore them out of the studio that same day. I haven't really taken them off since.
They reminded me right away of old Norwegian and Japanese glass fishing floats, the ones fishermen used to wrap in netting and send out to sea for the sole job of not sinking. Purely functional, quietly beautiful, and eventually swapped out for plastic because someone decided practicality should be a little sad too. We didn't want to copy the floats outright though. No netting, no rope, no maritime costume. On the nose inspiration isn't really our gig. Just the feeling behind them: something built to do a job that ended up gorgeous almost by accident.
I actually started designing this collection in bronze, which is sort of our house metal. I love bronze, I love that you can polish it back up bright whenever it dulls, the same way you would sterling. But these pieces don't get that chance. Once the metal's behind the glass, there's no taking it apart to buff it back to life. So the whole collection moved to 14k gold-filled instead. It costs more. It also doesn't need anything from you. It won't dull, won't ask to be maintained, and it'll still be catching light through that glass twenty years from now. When you're staring at metal through a sphere for the life of the piece, "eventually needs polishing" wasn't a trade-off I could reconcile.
Left to my own devices I would've made this collection in every color, every length, every combination I could think of. For a while I basically did, prototypes in nearly every hue we had. Then came the less fun part: taking things away. Coco Chanel had a rule about removing the last two accessories before you leave the house. I applied roughly the same logic to a whole collection, cutting anything that didn't earn its place. What's left is ten styles, each one doing something none of the others do.
A lot of these pieces don't want to be worn as a matched set, it turns out. My friend Casey bought a pair of the earring prototypes off me before Float was even officially a collection, and she wears one sphere in pink and one in amber like it's the most obvious decision in the world. She was right. Several of these are built to be mixed, color against color, size against size, which is either a design philosophy or an excuse to buy two. You decide. She will soon find that I am totally copying her color combo...
Most of the line is genuinely easy to live in day to day: adjustable lengths, a magnetic clasp, a safety chain on the bracelet so it doesn't wander off someone else's wrist by accident. The Sjø earrings are what I reach for most, light enough that I forget I'm wearing a literal glass orb on each ear. But then there's the Òkun bracelet, which I will defend as a design and will not defend as a practical decision. Not everything is made for a Tuesday, but rather for the most special of occasions! It's a piece that you actually have to be careful wearing -- seriously, it's a whole strand of glass orbs on your wrist. I made it anyway. I regret nothing. It insisted on being a part of the collection.
This is, without much competition, the most exciting collections we've made. Obsessive about materials, a little impractical in places, and built by two people who still argue about bronze versus gold-filled at the dinner table. We hope you love it as much as we do.
Jess
