Profile: ShopLuella
Recently I had the pleasure of sitting down and talking with Lily and Brian Booth at their home studio in Raleigh. A husband and wife team of artisan jewelry designers, they are passionate about pursuing their craft and it is evident in their stunning work.
Tell us more about your work, what you & Brian do and how ShopLuella started:
When Brian and I met in San Francisco, I had a studio downtown in an 11-story landmark building. There I worked on my own designs and was contracted for occasional repairs (skills I obtained in jewelry school). I had attended the Revere Academy in the same building and there was a strong sense of community amongst jewelry school graduates and trades people. Other artists in the building and I met for design meetings, where we shared our direction and sought critique. During the couple years I had the studio, I explored metalworking in terms of texture, color, and composition through different media. It was exciting to make things spontaneously and let the materials show their characteristics during the processes of forging and fusing glass to metal surfaces (enameling). These years were formative for my craft. Slowly, the cost of living in an expensive city and the stresses of a full-time job began to take their toll. My creativity drifted and I decided to drop the studio. I met Brian in the manufacturing sector and I began seeing an exciting new path for my ideas through the processes of mold making and reproduction. Working in wax was a far different from my familiar metal fabrication technique. It could be melted and edited easily; processes that lead themselves to sculpture rather than surface treatments. Brian and I have a symbiotic and perpetually inspiring relationship. Our interests overlap and yet our skill sets are relevant to our education, experience, and mentors. Color and texture are elements that seem endless to me. These are aspects that Brian appreciates greatly and uses in his own work, but his direction tends to be less free and more technical. When I make pieces we discuss the structural and cost viability, and in a way, I feel like sharing this with someone else allows me to be freer with my work.
What is different about North Carolina than San Francisco and what about it excites you?
People ask us at least weekly how we like it here. I feel like the work speaks for itself. Our work and ideas are thriving in hours that used to be overshadowed by exorbitant rent costs and a longing for what we have now. We have been here for nine months and have felt embraced by Raleigh and the Triangle area. Brian is originally from Raleigh, but I was born in San Francisco and grew up mostly in Southern California. Even though the seasons and weather have inspired us both, I am experiencing the change as new rather than nostalgic. The skies at sunset or during a wicked storm have made my Carolina experience electric and worthy of new color combinations in my latest enameled pendant. Just the other night I noticed the most unreal pattern on a moth, an unlikely place for me to find neon orange mixed with the colors of iridescent blue. My goal with ShopLuella has been to create an affordable and contemporary line of jewelry in enamel and metal. In the process, I have absorbed a new life of winters, springs, and summers far different from that of California, both northern and southern. Brian’s family all live fairly near to us now and share their summer crop of vegetables and herbs. I feel like we live more sustainably here. We are connected to the weather as it crashes down us in a brief summer storm at a lake retreat, but also as we slice the first heirloom tomato, covered in more color and pattern than memory seems to allow. No matter how thick the summer humidity can be, I feel like our souls can breathe deeper in Raleigh.
What current projects are you working on?
When we first moved here, we knew I would be developing a collection. Brian was queued to work as a tradesman for local stores and hit the pavement cautiously. As a contracted metalsmith and stone-setter, we felt like the flexibility of a per-job basis would work well both for us and for jewelry stores we may work for. The local jewelry store scene was grim. Most do not realize the amount of extraordinary jewelry talent in the Triangle area. Locally, stores focused mainly on employees instead of contractors. Of the few stores that had an opening for a skill set like Brian’s, the compensation was under what we were accustomed to. I feel that this realization is what pushed us to see the opportunity for our unique skill set. Brian continued his work for a couple designers across the country, including his previous employer to put food on the table and we set out to build a website. Boothcustom.com represents a niche we feel is under-represented in the jewelry industry. We have combined our skill-sets for a one-stop-shop for wholesale customers and the public. Since building the website we have worked on many of projects including the obvious custom jewelry, but also ranging from chocolate molds for a local handcrafted chocolate company to a production-worthy jewelry line for a local designer. We are seeing the need to adopt a strict code of ecologically responsible practices and have started using a metal source with 100% recycled material that is refined in a process with zero discharge into valuable water supplies. To use the local designer as an example, we are a bridge for those who have wonderful ideas but do not have the manufacturing background. We have taken a concept and aesthetic, researched the origins of the concept and its vital elements, and created prototypes which have brought reproducibility and predictability to a line of high-end jewelry. We could not think of a place where designers would go to find prototypes/CAD design, model/mold making, casting/reproduction, high-end finishing, product development, web services, logo design, and marketing concepts all in the same company. Working on all these elements allows us to control the quality and integrity of the final product, and that is where our interest lies, whether it is for our designs or the brainchildren of others.
How does being together so much affect your work?
This whole process is a juggle, but it is logical to us because we are passionate about our craft and the processes involved. At the beginning and end of each day Brian and I are a team. He chops while I sauté. I polish jewelry while he prepares the shipping labels online. Being together allows us to compliment one another. We have separate work benches but many of the tools are shared. It’s fun to crank up the music with someone else in the studio and laugh at their goofy chair dances and amateur falsettos. Did I mention it’s part of our job?
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