Off the road: a founder's manifesto

I have always taken the other way.

  1. 01 I was born in a post-Soviet country, into a working family far from art. I grew up in a world built for function and sameness, but I became a fine jeweler.
  2. 02 I opened a business in a crisis.
  3. 03 I moved to a country where I had no family and no plan B.
  4. 04 I painted my apartment in color because I had just bought a pair of colorful glasses and wanted the walls to match the way I saw.
  5. 05 I travel when the season is over and the streets belong to the people who live there.
  6. 06 I dine alone in a fine restaurant, and enjoy every minute.
  7. 07 I wear dresses and skirts when the city wears jeans, and my finest ring on an ordinary Tuesday.

None of it was rebellion for its own sake. Each time, I listened to what I wanted and trusted it more than the norm. That way of living has a name in Latin: dēvius, off the road. In its feminine form, devia, it became the name of this brand.

I know her well.

DEVIA is jewelry for the woman who chooses for herself. She is thirty, fifty, seventy and beyond. She knows her taste and has never needed permission to follow it. She buys a ring to mark her own milestone, gives one to a sister or a friend to hold a shared memory, or says yes with a stone no one else would have chosen. She collects pieces the way some people collect places: each one a story only she can tell.

Every piece begins with a stone.

At DEVIA, we travel to find the stones others pass over: an unusual color, an irregular size, the one stone with character in a parcel of ordinary ones. Our most special stones are cut in our own workshop, often in fantasy cuts shaped to show each color at its most alive. Some combinations of stone, color and cut happen only once. Those rings are the hardest to say goodbye to. We think of them as our shiny, colorful children, and like all children, they are meant to leave home one day.

Every piece is a small universe.

Often a center stone and the stones around it form a constellation: an orbit, a cluster, a play of geometry and light. We draw from the cosmos, from Art Deco precision and from the optimism of retro-futurism. The result belongs to no particular decade. A DEVIA ring could have been made a century ago or found tomorrow in a museum of modern art. In the cosmos, time moves differently, and so it does here.

The choice is yours.

We keep hundreds of stones waiting for the right person, and our door is open. Bring us a color that means something to you, a date, a feeling, a person, and we will build the piece around it. We love kaleidoscopic forms, because we believe a life is made the same way: every memory, every event, every decision adds a fragment of color, and with each turn the pattern becomes more yours. A DEVIA ring is one turn of that kaleidoscope, held still in gold or platinum, made slowly and by hand where it matters most.

P.S.

When my team and I first started saying the name out loud, I noticed how close it sounds to Dievs, the word for god in Latvian, my second language. The two words aren't related; it's a curious accident. But I like to think of DEVIA as a goddess of her own. Off the road, and toward the stars.