My name is Sandra Pokrant and I have been many things including a journalist and an environmental educator but the moment I picked up a jeweller’s hammer and started to work with metal, my heart sang loudly and I have been following my heart ever since. I am the grand-daughter of a blacksmith and there were generations of blacksmiths in the family before him, so I think that working metal is in my veins. I feel very nostalgic about my grand-father’s workshop. As a child, I was always fascinated and a little scared of the huge fire that roared there and I loved the rhythmic sound of the hammer as he forged metal to his will.
When I started Lulu + Belle, it was with just a couple of tools including a mini-anvil inherited from my grand-father’s workshop. I had a job during the day and made jewellery orders late into the evening from a tiny workshop in a spare bedroom. From the start, I knew that I wanted to make jewellery that was unique and meaningful to the wearer. I learned to hand-stamp using old-fashioned stainless steel stamps and continued to refine the process – growing our jewellery collection as my skills developed.
Fast forward a few short years and thousands of pieces of jewellery later, we have hand-stamped everything on our pieces from a baby’s first words, a couple’s wedding date to words of encouragement for a friend battling breast cancer.
We still hand-make every piece of jewellery to order, in our light-filled sea-side workshop, in the quaint harbour village of Rush. We simply love what we do and our small team is continually inspired by the stories behind the jewellery. Our personalised jewellery is dispatched all over the world from this workshop and I feel very privileged that our jewellery captures a special moment in time for people.