In the beginning

Here's to my first blog post. It's only taken me 3 years to write. Owning your own business is very confronting and learning how to communicate the deep creative forces behind my jewellery is SO HARD. :) But every single day I try to push myself further and show you whats really behind this brand. My name is Jodee, and I never dreamed I would be a designer. From a small coastal town in Victoria, Australia I actually studied Arts/Marketing majoring in Criminology and then planned to venture off to travel the world. It was at this time I moved to the famous Byron Bay in NSW of Australia. Whilst living there, with my new love who happened to be from another country, Israel - and we had met while he was travelling here, I was offered a dream job. To move to Sri Lanka, with my partner and run a surfing and yoga boutique hotel for 1 year. It really was hard to believe that everything I had wanted came in a pretty little package. I got to travel, I got paid to do it, I got to stay easily together with my partner, I got experience from the 4 years of study I had just completed and to top it off this contract was the basis of the de-facto visa my partner and I were going to apply for, crazy right? It was while working and living in Sri Lanka that I started selling jewellery. The hotel was this hidden Oasis on the Southern tip of the Island with no shops to be found anywhere in the vicinity. So, to pass his time my partner actually started to make jewellery, and so I decided to open a little store at the hotel. From there we also bought other jewellery and sold it at a profit and my life as a pirate began. :) After the contract ended, we moved to Israel so that my partner could work some more, and we could make his visa application. I lived there with him for 8 months on his Kibbutz. I couldn't work, and so I started to make jewellery (he taught me). I used crystals, leather, wires and feathers. I became OBSESSED. After some time the girls around me wanted to buy the jewellery, but I was so shy to sell it I just gave it away. Our journey continued and we went to conquer India. While in India, we had to strategically travel so that we could stay together as long as possible as we were waiting for his visa decision which can take almost 13months and he didn't have any other way to come to Australia, and our money was not so bountiful. So we would stay in 1 place for 3 - 4 weeks and I would sit and make jewellery. Something inside of me had been unlocked and I could not get enough, my imagination expanded and expanded and expanded. Ahh, to think back on those amazing days, by the rushing Paravati River, in the high Himalayan mountains of India makes me nostalgic. I became even more obsessed and much better at what I was making and so again I found myself in a predicament where others wanted to buy it. I was very attached to my pieces, they were little parts of me and reluctant to sell them. It was not until one of my close friends said to me, in a coastal town at the opposite end of the country, Jodee - You are crazy, your work is beautiful and you need money so you and your man can stay together. Go and sit on the beach market, where like a true gypsy you lay down a sarong and your pieces and hoards of tourists who gather to watch the sunset everyday come and shop.  I was shocked at the response, I gathered almost $300 US dollars on just one night, and if any of you have been to India, you know how far that can go, and so it ignited a passion for selling jewellery that I never knew I had and so the journey began.  To be continued...