With Bizoux Vacances, my role was to build a sub-brand inside Bizoux that could speak to a global audience. The Japanese market tends toward a classic, almost cookie-cutter idea of what jewelry should be; Vacances was meant to bring something fresh and new into that.

It started, fittingly, with a stone — and a trip to Jaipur. Growing up with a gemologist for a father, I'd always asked him why two seemingly identical stones could differ so wildly in price, and I'd assumed the lines and marks inside a stone were just a matter of the cut. Jaipur introduced me to inclusions and imperfections. Around the same time, I noticed that the pieces I got complimented on most were ones I'd made for practice, from "rejected" stones — the ones passed over for having too many inclusions. That was the realization Vacances is built on: the way the industry had always done things wasn't law. There was a real, unexplored beauty in these imperfect stones, and Vacances set out to put it at the center rather than hide it.