Zoë Chicco
LOS ANGELES, CA
In their own words
“With jewelry, you can create something that people wear every day that has significant, personal value to them. Jewelry is forgiving, it always fits! I love wearing it, making it, and sharing it with our clients. It's a really special and unique medium to me.”
-Zoë
Jason’s interview with Zoë
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Jason: Today, I get to interview Zoë Chicco. Zoë, your jewelry is so beautiful. What do you love about the jewelry industry?
Zoë: The thing that I love about jewelry, it's a really unique medium. You can create something that people can wear every day that has significant value to them. We do a lot of personalized pieces and things that people buy for special occasions. It's really nice to make things for people that they can pass down. Jewelry always fits. And I truly love it. I've always loved wearing it, making it, and sharing it with our customers. It's just really special to me.
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Jason: How did you become a jewelry designer?
Zoë: Ever since I was a child, I was making jewelry. I was always gluing things together around found objects, beads, whatever, anything. And this is when I'm very young. When I got older, when I was in high school, I had an art teacher who was a jeweler and she introduced jewelry making into one of our art classes. I liked creating things that were three dimensional and wearable. I went to college and was an art major with a jewelry, metalsmithing concentration. After school, I worked as a bench jeweler for two different jewelers while I was kind of creating my own line on the side. I started my own brand in 2000.
Jason: I'd love to hear more about the experience you had at Studio Art International in Florence. How has that influenced your career today?
Zoë: Florence is one of my favorite cities in the world. It was pretty incredible to go to an art school there. I took jewelry, photography, art history. Every class was like going to a different museum, a different church, actually getting to experience the art, which was absolutely incredible. And in terms of the jewelry, it was a really interesting experience because it's a very small jewelry studio in Florence. And they just teach you things that I would never would have learned elsewhere. We're drawing our own wire, we're making our own sheet. Every single thing is completely made from scratch. It was really just an incredible experience to learn that side of it, because we didn't necessarily do things that way in school. I don't make my wire, I buy it. But knowing how to make it is really rewarding. And it was a very cool experience. And I learned some techniques there that I still use. I forged a ring when I was in school there and I still have the ring in my collection. The experience in and of itself was inspiring.
Jason: Did you get a specialty because of this? Did you pick something up that stayed with you?
Zoë: I picked up a lot that stayed with me. But in terms of my specialty, I would say that my specialty actually developed after working with the first rep that I ever worked with, the first person I worked with at the very beginning of my career. She gave me the best advice. I was making pieces that were a bit more complicated and I was fresh out of school. And in my mind, if it wasn't difficult to make, then it wasn't valid. And she was the one that said to me: focus on making things that you want to wear. Like, what do you like to wear? What do you want to wear? She said “You have great style. Whatever you wear, people are going to want to wear too.” And I said, “Well, I kind of like simple, easy, everyday stuff. But like, that's not exciting.” But as soon as I realized that and accepted this idea of easy, every day, wearable jewelry, that's when I really started to have success. And now, there's a name for it which is “modern fine jewelry” or “modern demi-fine jewelry.” It's definitely become my specialty and what people come to us for. And it's nice because we have clients that are in their twenties and they're purchasing their first piece of fine jewelry. And we have that entry level price point, which I always want to offer so we have something for that audience. And then we also have pieces that are more aspirational, that women who can afford more are adding to their collections. I always want to try to offer something for everyone.
Jason: That’s interesting. In terms of inspiration, is there something getting you going now?
Zoë: I have been for a couple of seasons really inspired by the 70s and early 80s, like that heavy chain trend that I'm sure people are seeing, but trying to do that in my own way. And it's been really successful and it's actually kind of funny, it's kind of contradictory to what I said in that delicate wearable has been in our DNA from the beginning. But I am experimenting more with heavier, chunkier pieces. Still making them so you can wear them everyday, and people are starting to wear that idea more regularly. It's been fun for me to do my own version, but still incorporating personalized meanings and mantras and all these things that are popular and core with our pieces. As my style evolves and changes, I'm always incorporating that into what I'm offering. So, I'm kind of having that trend towards some chunkier things, layered with lighter things.
Jason: When you're designing these pieces and you’re in your workspace, what does it look like? Can you tell us about that?
Zoë: Our studio is one of my favorite places. Everything that we do for our business is under one roof. We have all of our production in-house. Our showroom is in the same building, all of our sales. Everything gets wrapped and shipped and packaged from there. I have an amazing team that I absolutely love and owe everything to. The office is a really beautiful, big open space. We’ve got skylights, windows, and it's a really great space to work in. I would say I probably do the majority and certainly the best designing, when I'm there. I tend to draw things first and then start to tinker with the actual material. So, I will go in the back where production is, and start to put the pieces together myself because I'm a very visual person. Working with the materials while I'm designing for me is a really important part of it. So having all of that together under one roof, is really great and something that I think is special about our brand.
Jason: I know your studio is environmentally-focused.
Zoë: We use recycled gold. We work with a reputable diamond dealer; all of our gems and diamonds are ethically-sourced and conflict-free. So, we really make an effort there. That's important to me and I know it's also important to our clients. I've been trying, especially over the past year, to be more conscious about waste. And so recently we've been trying to be more green in terms of our shipping and packaging. You know, jewelry comes pretty heavily packaged in terms of like, fine jewelry. It's like the box, the cards in a pouch, and all the tissue. And a lot of people enjoy that part of the experience. And so, we still have that. But someone had sent me a DM over Instagram that said, “I love your pieces so much. But I just have one earring and it came with all this stuff. And I feel like it's really wasteful.” I personally wrote back to her and was like, “You're right. We should certainly give an option. I don't want to take that away from everyone if they want that for giving a gift or whatever it may be. But you're right, if you don't need all of this, we shouldn't be using it. It's wasteful.” We then added on our website the option to not have the packaging. So, we're always listening and looking for ways to do better.
Jason: Tell me about what prompted Inside ZC Studio?
Zoë: We sell to some bigger stores, and so we're turning out a lot of inventory. The fact that we make it ourselves in-house—it’s fifteen jewelry makers that are there, bench jewelers, making everything by hand in our studio. I feel like that's an important part of my brand and our story. So we wanted to shine a light on the artists that are making the jewelry. The ZC Studio is like this behind-the-scenes where we're introducing different people that work in the office. We're mostly focusing on the bench jewelers, but I'm sure we'll cover some of the sales team and marketing and everything else as well. With the jewelers we've featured so far, we tell a bit about them, what they like, what they don't like, to try to get to know them more as people. Because they're all individual parts of our team and it's not a factory somewhere in another country or even a manufacturer in downtown LA. We are this small group of artisans working together to create this jewelry. Every single thing is made to order by hand. So, I thought it was really important to tell that part of our story.
Jason: Yeah, you know that just breeds trust. And our business is really all about that. So, tell us what trust means to you.
Zoë: I think trust mainly for me is about transparency. And like how and why we do what we do, and trust with our partners and with our clients, and just being really honest with them. I would say that's probably the most important thing to me. We're incredibly trustworthy with our employees and our team. We're kind of like a happy family. The jewelry is out in the showroom, our jewelers in the back have access to the stones and the materials and stuff like that. I've heard of other shops where everything is locked up and they drop one stone, and they have to come and explain why. And we try not to be, I don’t know if strict is the right word, but we try to let them know that we trust them and we know that everybody is working towards a common goal. And it's the same thing with our stores—there’s trust there too.
Jason: So, tell me a story or two. It could be an engagement story, it could be a romantic customer story. Do you have one that you can share that’s top of mind?
Zoë: This is top of mind because it's fairly recent and it was probably the most significantly personal piece of jewelry I think I may have ever made. A very good friend of mine’s mother passed away suddenly, and it was right before his father's birthday. He asked me to make a ring for his father from a piece of his mom's jewelry. He asked, “are you able to melt it down and make it into the ring?” And I said, “Absolutely.” He gave me the jewelry and I designed a ring for him. And we were trying to think of as many different ways we could symbolize their love story in this one piece of jewelry. And I mean, they had been together a long time, they were high school sweethearts. So we made a pattern on the ring that repeated for every year they were married. And then I asked if he had any handwriting samples from her, which he did. So we inscribed it with a special message and her signature. This was a piece of jewelry that she wore and now he's going to be able to wear it every day with all these deeply meaningful elements things wrapped up into it. And my friend said to me, “Not only is this a gift for my father, this is a gift for me. This is going to be mine one day.” I'm getting choked up just saying it. This is full circle and everything we've been talking about why jewelry is so special. And it's just so incredible that jewelry can have this kind of sentiment and mean so much to people. And just the fact that we were able to create that for them and for their family was probably, as I said, one of the most special and significant pieces to honor a love story that we have ever done.
Jason: Wow. What is the heirloom quality signifying?
Zoë: Heirloom in my mind is fine jewelry, because fine jewelry will stand the test of time and hold its value. But also, in terms of wanting to hand something down. It's having something that is significant and personal to the person who is handing it down.
Jason: And you've been doing this for twenty years. And one of your initiatives in 2020, which was really neat, you connected with twenty women and did collaborations with them. Can you tell us about that experience?
Zoë: Oh, yeah, we're actually still in it. So the idea was to celebrate my 20th anniversary to collaborate with twenty different women and do twenty different pieces that we would sell only on our website. We sell each piece for an entire year. And during that time, we give the proceeds from the sales to a charity of their choice. We want it to give back to our community and also introduce some of these women that I am personally very inspired by to our community as well. So it was a fun process to go through and make a list of the people that we wanted to work with and shine a light on what they’re doing. And then to collaborate with them, it's so much fun. Every single person is so different. It's a really fun experience for me because I hadn't really done many collaborations before and now I'm doing them every month. And the whole thing that they want to do, that's completely different and a departure from what we normally do. So it's been really fun. I’m working on one now, but it's totally outside the box of the norm of what we normally do. And it's going to be really cool. And it's just so fun to get everybody's different perspectives and get to know these women better. Some of them I've known for years, some of them I don't know at all. And I just was like, “I think you're amazing” and reached out to them on DM. And that we're giving back, which was really the whole idea like, “I don't want to be profiting from this. I want it to be something where I've been in business for twenty years and I want to give back to the community.”
Jason: I love that. You know, the community involvement you've had is really important. I'd love to hear what's on your mind and what we should know about.
Zoë: One thing that I just started doing, which is really exciting, is a mentorship program. I do the Couture show and they started a diversity action control committee, and they reached out to me and said, “Hey, we're doing this BIPOC mentor program. Would you be one of the mentors?” And I was like, “ Absolutely. I would love to do that.” So they provided this amazing platform and opportunity. There's a bunch of us, between fifteen and twenty different designers and people in the jewelry industry. And we're doing this mentorship program and it is really an incredible experience for all of us. It's so nice, first of all, to have this connection with this designer (who is fabulous by the way) and be talking to her regularly and helping in whatever way I can. But it also feels good to be able to be give back in this way, to share my experience and what I can with her, to really help her propel her business forward. You don't think about all the things that you've learned over the twenty years you've been in business that just seem like at this point to me common knowledge. But they're really not to somebody who's trying to build their business.
Jason: And we hope that over time, you can make this a continuous thing and more designers will come on and you can grow this mentorship program.
Zoë: Yeah, it was really amazing.
Jason: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here.
Zoë: So nice speaking with you as well. Thanks for having me.
