【California, 】Origin Jewelry Has Magnetic Appeal

It’s not just the ease of putting the necklaces on and taking them off that makes Debra Reiff’s Origin Jewelry special. The jewelry has beautiful colors with a glass-like finish. The pieces are made with resin with a piece of shell underneath.

A Dutch designer she worked with taught her about color.

They were working mainly with clothing boutiques so they wanted to match the colors to the ones being shown in stores that season.
Reiff has been making jewelry since she was a college student at U Mass Amherst in the 1980s. A summer job as an assistant to a jewelry maker taught her all about how to do the piecework, making the loops and selling jewelry at trade shows locally in Massachusetts and in New York. She began to consider the possibility of starting a jewelry business herself. After college, she lived in Israel for a year where she began working with Israeli designers and factories. She moved back to the U.S., first to the east coast and then in 1996 to California where she preferred the warm weather and didn’t have to see frost on the crocuses in May. She met a Dutch designer at a jewelry show in Frankfort and began designing two collections a year with him. When he retired in 2020, she worked with his brother and his wife who had a factory in the Philippines. After a typhoon damaged the factory, she found small producers in China who manufactured her designs with safe and fair practices.
Just before the pandemic, Reiff was at a museum in Montreal where she saw jewelry with magnetic pieces embedded in plastic.

She knew the jewelry would be a hit, especially with older women who had trouble with the regular “lobster claw” clasps.

Origin Jewelry is sold at art shows and museum art stores around the country. Twice a year she sells at a show where her 97-year-old mother-in-law lives.

In the New Jersey and New York area, you can view the collection and purchase Origin jewelry at www.originjewelryretail.net