The studio closed for the year yesterday. The trays are covered. The morning's last piece — a Field Notes for a wearer in Buenos Aires — was finished and photographed on the 22nd, packed by Daisy on the 23rd, and is now in DHL's hands. Wei left for Hangzhou on the morning train. Daisy goes home to Guangzhou tomorrow. I am at my desk at home, writing this.
The studio is seven. We have made — as of the morning of December 23rd — 423 pieces in our archive. I want to write something at this close, because I think a brand that started in 2024 should mark the close of a seventh year carefully. Most brands at seven are either much bigger than us or have failed. Being neither is unusual. I want to name what that means.
What I thought year seven would look like, in 2024
In June 2024, I made piece #001. That night, I sat in the apartment and tried to imagine where the studio would be in seven years. I wrote a short paragraph about it in a notebook I still have. I will quote what I wrote because I think it is funny now:
"By 2031, SENMOMO will have made around 100 pieces total. I will probably have closed the studio by then and gone to do something else. The bracelets I made will still be on the wrists they were made for. That will be enough."
I was wrong on every count. I have made over four times as many pieces as I predicted. I have not closed the studio. I am not going to do something else. The bracelets are still on the wrists, yes — but that part of the prediction is the least surprising. The surprising part is that the work itself has become the thing I want to keep doing for as long as my hands work.
I would not have predicted that. I would have considered it sentimental. 35-year-old mo at the bench in June 2024 thought she was making 100 careful objects to prove a point about how things should be made, and then planning to leave. 42-year-old mo at the desk in December 2030 has stopped planning to leave. That is the seven-year change in the shortest possible form.
What I would tell her, if I could
If I could write back to her — 35-year-old mo, in June 2024, at the kitchen table with piece #001 still on the linen — I would tell her four things.
First: stop trying to figure out whether the studio will succeed. You do not have the information yet. The information arrives slowly, over years, in the form of specific wearers writing specific letters. You cannot predict who they will be or what they will say. Just keep making the next piece carefully and the information will come.
Second: the financial part will work out, but not the way you expected. You will spend the next two years undercharging and then have to raise prices — gently, with explanation — which will feel like a violation of your principles. It will not be one. It will be the part of running a studio that you did not know you were going to have to do, and it will be fine. Your wearers will understand. Most will accept it without comment.
Third: Wei is coming. You do not know her name yet. She is currently 26 and working at a pearl-stringer's atelier in Hangzhou. She will arrive at the studio in April 2028 with two suitcases. You will not know whether to take her. Take her. The decision is one of the best you will ever make.
Fourth: when the morning of February 11, 2025 comes — and you sit at the bench for forty minutes without working, and you almost give up — do not give up. The Tianjin wearer's second message will come. You will know what to do then. Until then, just sit at the bench. Do not draft the refund email. Do not pack the trays.
That is what I would say. Most of it she would not believe; that's fine.
What I would tell 50-year-old me
I have started writing notes for her. This is one of them.
I am 42. She is probably eight years away. By the time she is reading these, the studio will be fifteen. The Founding 200 will have been on the wearer list for nine years. Wei will be 36 and probably making more pieces than I am, with mo's review occasionally on the unusual letters. Wei will probably have taken on her own apprentice. Mr. Lu's daughter will probably be running his workshop. Daisy will probably have decided whether to stay at SENMOMO or move on. The numbering will be approaching the end of Chapter One. Or: none of these things will be true; predictions across eight years are mostly wrong.
What I want her to know is one thing. The work is the point. Not the brand. The work. If at some point in the next eight years, SENMOMO starts to feel like a brand we have to maintain rather than a body of work we are continuing to make, stop. Cut the marketing. Cut the headcount. Cut the catalog. Make ten bracelets a year if that's what's needed to keep the work feeling like the work. Do not let the studio become a thing that exists because it used to be a thing that worked.
I think this is the single hardest thing about a small studio at our scale, which is to say: the moment when the studio is big enough to have momentum but not big enough that its momentum is no longer a choice. We are at that moment now. I am writing it down so that 50-year-old me has a record of when the question first became active.
What I have learned about the wearer
I have learned a thing about wearers that I did not know in 2024. I want to write it down.
The wearers of SENMOMO pieces are not a demographic. They are not a customer segment. They are not even, fully, a coherent group. They share one thing: each of them has, at some point in her life, decided that the material thing she carries on her wrist should mean something specific. This is the only shared trait. Beyond it, they are different from each other in almost every way.
I had assumed, in 2024, that SENMOMO would attract a particular kind of buyer — design-conscious, woman, urban, 30s-40s, comfortable with $200. We do attract those buyers. We also attract a 67-year-old in Vancouver who had never written to a brand before. We attract a 12-year-old in Mumbai who needed something to hold during chemotherapy. We attract a forester in Oregon. We attract a Brooklyn lit-mag editor and a Stockholm illustrator and a Tokyo coffee-shop owner and a German pediatrician. The demographic is "people who want material things to mean specific things." That is a wider and stranger group than I had expected.
I think this is good news, structurally. It means we are not subject to demographic shifts. The wearer is defined by an internal posture, not by an external category. As long as that posture exists in the world — and I do not see why it would stop — there are wearers for us.
What I have learned about myself
One thing, briefly.
I am better at this than I thought I would be. I do not mean this as confidence. I mean it as observation. In 2024 I assumed I was the bottleneck — that my pace and my standards would limit the studio. They did, for a while. Then Wei arrived, and I had to learn to teach. Teaching taught me what I knew. Knowing what I knew taught me to do it more deliberately. Doing it more deliberately made me better.
I had not expected the apprenticeship to make me better at my own work. I expected it to slow me down. It did slow me down, briefly, but the trade was good. I am quieter at the bench now. I make fewer mistakes. I notice things at first look that used to take me a week to see. Some of that is just six more years of practice. Some of it is Wei.
This is, I think, why "small craft sustains small craft." Not for poetic reasons. For practical ones. Each addition to the network changes the practice of every other node. Mrs. Yang's training of Wei changed me. Mr. Lu's two-year box collaboration changed how I think about objects in homes. Wei's working through the Mumbai piece changed her in ways I am only now noticing. The studio is a place that gets quietly better because of who walks into it.
The close, plainly
The studio reopens on January 4th, 2031. The first piece of the new year is going to a wearer in Kyoto. Wei will make it. I will review it. The second piece is going to a wearer in Cape Town — Thandi has ordered a second piece, for her own birthday, and the design we have settled on is a small reference to the first. I will make that one. Wei will review.
The journal will continue. Wei's next entry is in March. Mine is in June. The Hangzhou paper-makers will continue. The clasp engraver will continue. The Hetian jade family will continue. None of this is new. That is the point.
If you wear a SENMOMO piece, your piece is now part of something that has lasted seven years and is structurally designed to last another fifty. I am quietly relieved that I get to be here at this stage. I did not expect it. I am grateful.
To the wearers who have written this year, who have given pieces to children and parents and partners and themselves, who have waited for boxes, who have replied within an hour and who have taken three days, who have read this journal and written back about specific sentences: thank you. I read every message. I will continue to.
To Wei: thank you for joining. The studio is better for it.
To Daisy: thank you for handling the thousand things I never see. The studio runs because of you in ways nobody knows.
To Mr. Lu, to Akiko, to the Hetian family, to the Minas Gerais siblings, to the Ratnapura dealer, to all the named and unnamed hands in the network: thank you for being part of this.
Year eight starts in twelve days. I will see you in January.