Jewel of Havana
Jewelry, Necklaces, Earrings

Transcript

Ana Maria Andrician: I'm Anna Maria Andricain and I am the owner and artist behind Jewel of Havana, Handcrafted jewelry. And my studio is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana but I travel all over the Southeast for juried art festivals all over. I combine metal clay techniques with sheet metal and traditional metalsmithing.

VO:  Ana’s love of jewelry started with her family and their amazing journey.

AMA: Really, what my jewelry is about is connecting people to each other and places and times and moments. I'm a daughter of Cuban refugees, and obviously, when they fled Cuba, they weren't allowed to bring anything with them. My mom had this little box that had these pieces. And even the wedding bands that I wear today were my grandmother and grandfather’s, they were married 60 years, she sewed them in the lining of her bra and was able to get them out. Every time she took one of these pieces out it always sparked some kind of memory or story or something of her childhood. I learned about my great-grandparents, my aunts, uncles, moments in time in Cuba. You know, I learned about quinceaneras. I learned about all these, like family history from the memories that came to her every time she pulled something out.

VO: But jewelry making wasn't Ana's first love. She came to it from a very different career. 

AMA: This is a little bit of a crazy story, but I was an actress on Broadway and I lived in New York City 25 years. And so when you're in shows, a lot of times you'll have long breaks. So a lot of people will read or do crossword puzzles or do Sudoku or things like that. So I was always crocheting or doing things with my hands. And a girl in the dressing room was making a pair of earrings. I just thought that looked really cool. I'm like, Oh, show me what you're doing and then that was it. I just kind of took off making jewelry backstage. That kind of became my sort of between scenes, I would run up to the dressing room and design something and make it. So all the girls in the dressing room decided, Hey, let's make a bunch of stuff and we'll throw like a little show in the dressing room between shows on Saturday. And I did not know how to price. I knew nothing. This was a hobby. This was not, I'm just making stuff for friends and family. After everyone got the gifts and the feedback that I got and how people responded to it. And somebody wore a piece into a store that had just opened and the store owner said, Where did you get that? He called. They started buying for stores. So something that I just never even thought of as a business, I saw the value of it and I saw through the feedback that people felt about jewelry the way that I grew up thinking about jewelry. 

So I continued making jewelry and running this business as a side business in New York. My husband got a job opportunity in Baton Rouge to get The Saenger reopened. It had been boarded up since Katrina, and it was an exciting project and obviously I can't work on Broadway in Baton Rouge, so I transition  into, I just wanted to see, can I turn this into a full-time business? It was always just a little side thing. I never gave it my full attention. So it just sort of all tied in together. And so I quickly started studying up on how do you start a business, How do you run a business? All of the things I got, I found the Small Business Administration. They had a program where they pair you with a mentor. And so I just sort of learned everything very quickly and got a website together and just started trial and error. And it just kind of grew from there. Both my skills as a jeweler and also my skills as a business owner. But moving to Baton Rouge, I just said, All right, this is it. I'm going to give six months. I'm going to just give it my 100% attention to this and see if I can replace my Broadway salary. And we did. In just six months. It became enough that I could tell my agent, I'm going to move here permanently. And, you know, just kind of transitioned out of performing.  25 years of Broadway shows. But it was it was a great career. I loved it. 

So, blessing and a curse. I did not go to school for making jewelry. I didn't get a degree in making jewelry. The blessing is you don't know what you don't know. And so you try things that some people will say later on, wait how are you doing that, that doesn't work. Like well, it works for me. I didn't know it didn't work. So I tried it and it did. 

VO: But without events and markets, Ana and Jewel of Havana Handcrafted Jewelry may never have thrived. 

AMA: Really, how I built my real business at the beginning was being in person, being live around  people. Needing them, introducing them to my jewelry, to our core values, and all the things that go into marketing your business. 

VO: Ana’s second act with  Jewel of Havana has been a huge success. So reach out to her and get her to your next event here with Eventeny.