On apprentices.

A year ago this month, a young woman named Wei arrived in Wenchang from Hangzhou with two small suitcases and the offer of an apprenticeship at the studio. She is 28. She had been hand-knotting pearls for two years at a small atelier in Hangzhou, the same kind of work I had to fly to Osaka to learn. Her hands were better than mine were at her age. She came because she'd written to me, twice, asking quietly whether I might ever consider training someone. The second letter changed my mind.

I want to write about the decision to take her on. I want to write about what the first year has been. And I want to be honest about what changes — about the work, about the brand, about my own days — when there are two pairs of hands at the bench instead of one.

Why I had said no for a year

Wei's first letter arrived in early 2027. I read it twice and didn't reply for three weeks. When I did reply, I said something polite and indirect — that I wasn't taking apprentices at this time, that the studio was too small. Both things were true. Neither was the actual reason.

The actual reason was that I didn't yet know how to teach what I did. I knew how to do it. The two are not the same thing. The difference between a maker and a teacher is years of practice in articulating what you know, in front of someone who needs you to articulate it. I had never done that. I had only ever made pieces alone, at this bench, in this light. If I taught Wei wrong, I would be passing a corrupted version of the work forward — and the corruption would compound.

So I declined. I told myself I'd reconsider in a year. I half-believed it.

The second letter

Wei wrote again in late 2027, six months after the first. The letter was shorter. It said, more or less: "I understand. I want you to know I'm still here. I've been studying your stones from photographs and reading your journal. If you ever change your mind, I will move within the month."

She didn't ask for anything. She didn't pitch. She didn't try to convince me. She wrote one paragraph and signed it.

I sat with that letter for a week. Then I called Daisy, who has been with the studio since 2024 and knows me better than my own family does in some ways, and I read it to her. Daisy listened. When I finished, she said: "You should say yes. You're not going to teach forever — but you're not at forever yet. You'd be better at teaching if you'd done it once before forever arrived."

I sat with that another few days. Then I wrote back to Wei. I said: "I am uncertain whether I can teach you properly. But I would like to try. If you can move to Wenchang by April, the bench is yours to share. We will figure the rest out."

She arrived four weeks later.

The first month

The first month was painful for both of us, I think. Wei is patient and skilled. She has been doing fine work for years. She did not need me to explain how to thread silk or how to tie a basic pearl knot. What she needed me to explain was why I pick the particular bead I pick, out of four that are nominally identical.

I didn't know how to explain it. I would look at the trays, pull a bead, and string it. Wei would watch and ask: "Why that one?" And I would say something embarrassingly vague — "It was the right one," or "It fit." Which is true but not useful. She would try the same selection in the same kind of bracelet a day later and pick something different, equally defensible, and we would both look at the resulting piece and see — clearly — that hers was less right than mine, in some way neither of us could yet name.

The first month of teaching her was the first month I'd ever been forced to find words for what my hands had learned. It was harder than I expected. There were several afternoons when I sat at the bench and felt I'd been a fraud my whole career — that I didn't have any skill, just an accumulated set of accidents that happened to work.

That feeling passed eventually. But it was the cost of the first month.

What I taught, and what she taught herself

By the third month, I'd worked out a rough division of labor. I could teach Wei specific things, in words: the standard for moonstone adularescence (we look for a flash at 30 degrees from the window), the tension at the clasp end (the silk should be one-eighth tighter at the clasp than at the center), the rule about pink opal next to mother of pearl (they have to be at least three beads apart or they cancel each other). These I could articulate. These she absorbed.

What I could not teach — what she had to teach herself, by repetition, on hundreds of practice pieces that did not ship — was the harder thing: the feel for which bead is right for which composition. I told her, after a particularly frustrating week: "You will not learn this from me. You will learn it from your own hands, by picking wrong for a long time and watching what 'wrong' looks like, until 'right' becomes something you can feel before you think it."

She nodded. She kept making practice pieces. By the sixth month, I would walk by her bench, look at her composition before she'd photographed it, and see — quietly — that she'd picked correctly. I would say nothing. She would notice my silence and understand it. That was the change.

What she taught me

I want to write this part carefully, because I do not want to flatter her or condescend to her. Wei taught me several things in the first year. Three I want to name.

First: my own habits had calcified more than I knew. I had been doing every step the same way for four years, because nobody had asked me why. Wei asked, regularly, whether a step was the way it was because it had to be or because that's how I'd happened to start doing it. About a quarter of the time, I had to admit it was the latter. I changed several small things because she made me question them. Not because she was right and I was wrong — because she was asking a question I'd forgotten to ask.

Second: I had been working slowly because I was alone, not because the work required it. With two people at the bench, the studio's output doubled in some weeks and the quality didn't drop. I had been treating "slow" as a virtue when in fact a chunk of the slowness was just the friction of doing everything by myself. The genuinely irreducible slowness — the time the silk needs, the time the wearer needs to sit with the photograph — is the same. The accidental slowness, the kind that came from one person doing thirty steps in series, dropped.

Third: I had been undervaluing the conversation with Daisy as a part of the studio's craft. Watching Wei try to enter the studio's rhythm made me see, for the first time, that Daisy and I had developed a shorthand — a way of moving around each other, of finishing each other's sentences about a piece — that was itself an artifact of the work. Wei had to learn it. Watching her learn it made me realize Daisy and I had built something I hadn't named.

The hardest moment, so far

It came around month nine. Wei had been making pieces under my review for several months. She was good. The pieces were shipping. Then one afternoon she handed me a composition for review and I looked at it and said, quietly: "This isn't quite right. The moonstone in position three should be one of the smaller ones."

She looked at me and said, with no edge in her voice: "I disagree. I think it's right."

I held the piece for a long moment. I had not expected her to disagree. I'd expected her to adjust. We sat at the bench in silence for a while. Then she said: "I think you'd pick the smaller one because the wearer wrote that she was tired. But I read the same letter and I heard her say she wanted to feel more present. The larger moonstone is more present."

She was right. I'd misread the wearer. Wei had read more carefully than I had.

The piece shipped as Wei had assembled it. The wearer wrote back two weeks later to say it was perfect. I taped that note to a wall above Wei's bench, on a small card that just says "You were right."

That moment changed the studio. From then on, I have treated Wei not as an apprentice but as a second maker. We sometimes disagree. We talk it through. Sometimes I'm right; sometimes she is; sometimes the wearer gets a piece that's better than either of us would have made alone.

What this means for the brand

I want to be honest about the implications for SENMOMO.

As of this writing, I personally make about 70% of the pieces that ship. Wei makes the rest, with my review on most and without my review on some. Across the next year, that ratio will probably move to 50/50. We have not announced this publicly until now, and I suspect a few wearers will be slightly uncomfortable to learn it. The maker promise has always been that mo makes your piece. The maker promise now is: mo or Wei makes your piece, and either of us reviews the other's work before it ships.

I think this is the right evolution. It is the same logic as the Heritage page: the work has to outlive a single pair of hands, and that requires at least one other pair of hands to learn how. Wei is the first. She will probably not be the last.

If you are a wearer who feels that "Wei made my piece" is somehow lesser than "mo made my piece" — write to me, and I'll move you into my own queue. I will not be hurt. But I will say this gently: the piece Wei makes you will be the same piece. She is, at this point, indistinguishable from me in the quality of the work. The only difference is that the years of accumulated standard she's holding to are mine, applied by her hands.

That, I now realize, is what an apprentice is. Not a junior version of the master. A second set of hands holding the same standard, learning to apply it independently. Wei is approaching that. I am proud, in a way I hadn't expected to be.

What I would not do

Two limits, since this is also a brand-discipline post.

I will not take on apprentices at scale. The studio will probably never have more than three or four people at the bench. Apprenticeship at the scale we're doing it is a one-to-one transmission of standard, and that transmission scales linearly, not exponentially. I cannot teach twelve people the way I taught Wei. Either I teach one or two more in the next decade, or someone Wei teaches becomes the next teacher. We will not become a brand of fifty makers.

I will also not delegate the conversation with wearers. The questions I wrote about last quarter — the asking — that part stays with me, and with Daisy. Wei makes pieces. She does not yet handle the wearer interviews. Maybe one day. Not yet. The asking is, in some sense, the part that's hardest to teach, and I want to be sure I know how before I try.

What this means for you

If you have ordered or are about to order a SENMOMO piece, the practical change is small: your piece will be made by either of us, with the other reviewing. The standard is the same. The archive entry will note who made the piece (we've added this field). Either of us touches every piece that leaves the studio.

If you'd like to know more about Wei — who she is, how she works — she's begun writing a small section in the journal once a quarter, starting in September. The first entry is about her hands. Her voice is different from mine. I find this delightful.

The studio is now a place with two voices. It changes the work, slightly, in ways I am still working out. But it has also made me, finally, confident that what I built can outlast me. That is what I needed Wei for. And, separately, gratefully, that is what she came here to be.