Founding Amora Adera: How I Became a Fine Jewelry Designer

From modeling in New York and London to translating the ancient symbols of the Nile Valley & Sub-Sahara into modern heirlooms.
By Sophia Lovella
Published about 2 hours ago • 3 min read
I am Sophia Lovella, the founder and lead designer of Amora Adera, a fine jewelry house creating heirloom pieces inspired by ancient symbols of the Nile Valley & Sub-Sahara. People often ask how someone ends up designing jewelry rooted in thousand-year-old symbolism. The honest answer is that I was raised inside a world of design long before I ever knew it was one.
My mother worked in fashion design for years before opening our family restaurant. My earliest memories are of garment construction, textiles, and form. I did not think of it as training at the time. It was simply the language spoken in our house. Structure, drape, proportion, and material. That vocabulary settled into me early, especially as I attended her University courses with her, often hiding under her desk; my mother’s way of saving on childcare as a single mom, bless her professors for letting me crash the classroom party.
Design led me to fashion, and fashion led me to modeling. I entered the industry as a teenager, often by just being asked by her fashion friends… borrowing me for runway when they ran short on the real models. But then it became a bit more real when I was hand-selected as a semi-finalist during the selection rounds of America’s Next Top Model, and placed as a Top 7 finalist in Miss Colorado. My modeling career carried me through style capitals like New York and London, and it taught me something no classroom could: how a single object, worn on a body, can change the entire story a person tells about themselves.
The other half of my education came from geography. I spent formative years of my childhood in Kenya, and later lived in New Zealand as an adult. Even before I was born, my parents had a beautiful love story where my American-Scottish father and Ethiopian mother got married on camel-back in the Nubian mountains of Egypt. They each speak 5 languages, and would hop between them when concealing secret conversations amongst us kids.
Growing up between cultures teaches you that adornment and fashion is a language of its own, without ever needing a word. And it’s never just decoration. Everywhere in the world, for all of recorded history, people have worn symbols to mark who they are, what they have survived, and what they carry forward. That idea will not let me go.

Fine jewelry became the place where all of it converged. The three-dimensional discipline of form I learned from my mother’s world. The understanding of how objects live on the body from my modeling years. The reverence for symbolic tradition from a childhood spent between continents. Amora Adera is the house I built to hold that convergence based on my personal history and also my family’s Nile and Sub-Sahara lineage.
Amora Adera is all about modern, museum-quality pieces that translate the ancient visual language of the Nile Valley and the Sub-Sahara into designs made to be inherited, not just owned.
We call them modern heirlooms. Each piece begins with a real symbol and its documented history, then moves through contemporary design and precision craftsmanship until it becomes something you could hand to a daughter or a son decades from now with the story intact.
Alongside Amora Adera, I remain a co-owner of Raska International, my mother’s restaurant, where that original entrepreneurial Sub-Sahara and Nile Valley legacy also continues in a different creative medium. The two might seem unrelated, but they are branches of the same tree: a family that builds things with its hands and tells stories through what it makes.
Amora Adera’s first sterling silver collection is currently in design. If the idea of wearing a piece of documented history appeals to you, you can learn more about the house and my work at Amora Adera.
Explore the house: AmoraAdera.com
Meet the Founder: Amoraadera.com/pages/sophia-lovella
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Sophia Lovella
Founder & lead designer of Amora Adera — heirloom fine jewelry inspired by ancient symbols of the Nile Valley & Sub-Sahara. Former model.