Roseate crafts jeweled pendants for self-expression. Each piece is designed to communicate with a visual, imaginative, and personal language. This essay explores the design inspiration involved in turning visual cues into meaningful, wearable art.
Our founder, Pam Cloud, spent a career at Tiffany & Co. developing product ideas and visiting the vast, storied design archives. Our challenge creating wand pendants for Roseate was to tell a story for the people who buy the jewelry. Yes, jewelry is about show, fashion, prestige, and social station, but jewelry is an emotional possession, more than people commonly realize. If you ask people about their jewelry (and we do this all the time), they will say that almost every piece emblemizes a moment, a milestone, or a season of life.
We wanted to make jewelry as a storyteller and a talisman. Imagine an item that looks great to wear, but also embodies meaning, luck, and enhances personal values and powers. For this we turned to ceremonial wands, the caster of spells, the baton of the wizard's otherworldly powers. Wands are about imagination, the deeper currents of life. They are about the wild potential of walking between meanings and walking between worlds.
Our idea for wands has an underpinning in the biological sciences. Proprioception, often called the "sixth sense," is your body's ability to sense its position in space. A network of sensory receptors from muscles, joints, and skin creates a field of perception fed back to the brain. Neurologically, this allows for the body's coordinated movement and balance. But the practical reach of our sixth sense is not understood. Many people believe the sixth sense is a dynamic force of untapped potential. In the sixth sense there is another level of human ability, perception and knowledge. So, what if we create a wand as a focal point, an enhancer of personal presence?
For a jewelry designer, the idea of tapping into an unbounded sixth sense gives you a lot to work with. If you are designing with such a vast potential of symbolic language, it is helpful to begin with a foundation - perhaps start with elemental themes we all know? With that core concept we designed seven wands based on themes:
**The Love Wand has the sacred form of the heart. It is a reminder that love begins inside and radiates outward.
**The Unity Wand intertwines metal and gemstone in an eternal dance symbolizing the harmonies that emerge when separate paths join as one.
**The Light Wand captures the first rays of dawn in metallic form, illuminating your path on the darkest days and most sacred nights.
**The Bloom Wand captures the moment of magic when a flower unfurls with life facing the sun. It is a reminder that growth comes in its own perfect time.
**The Water Wand captures the fluid grace and serene power of life's most essential element, reminding us to connect with emotional depths while both yielding and persisting.
**The Prosperity Wand holds the wisdom and ascendance of true success and abundance. Its design mirrors the sacred geometry of nature's most prosperous systems.
**The Loyalty Wand has an interlocking design that represents sacred commitment. It is a symbol of honor and constancy.
For Roseate the pendant is the right jewelry piece to explore this expansive design language. A ring is always visible on the hand, but a pendant is at the nexus of visibility and secrecy. A pendant is worn near the heart, revealed and concealed in layers of clothing. Selectively revealed, a pendant says something about the wearer in hieroglyphic, visual language.
We believe that a jewelry talisman of personal power ought to be empowered itself. That's why from each sale of a Roseate wand we give 20% to the Billion Oyster Project, working to restore live oyster beds in the Hudson River of New York City. Billion Oyster collects discarded oyster shells from New York City restaurants, sterilizes and cures them, seeds them with oyster larvae, and then replaces our lost oyster reefs with a living, growing testament. Each wand comes with that practical, thoughtful goodwill.
Jewelry is more than a fashion or ornamental object. People reflect on jewelry and invest emotionally in it. That’s why we designed wands with a personal story in mind. That’s why we created them using metals and gemstones from sources we know personally. That’s why we explored and found a charitable connection for greater meaning.
From there any magic is possible.
