Wei mentioned, at the end of her March entry, that she and I were working on something we hadn't yet announced — a collaboration with a Hangzhou paper-maker on the boxes. The work is finished. The first boxes ship in August. I want to write down how the collaboration began and what it produced, because I think it is the kind of thing that should be on the record.
The paper-maker is named Mr. Lu. He is 71. He has been making mulberry paper by hand in a workshop on a small lane in Hangzhou's Xiaoshan district for forty-six years. He learned from his father, who learned from his grandfather. There are two other people in his workshop now: his daughter, who runs the books, and a quiet man named Wang, who has been pulping bark for Mr. Lu since 2008.
I met Mr. Lu through Mrs. Yang, who taught Wei. Mrs. Yang's atelier and Mr. Lu's workshop are on the same lane. They have known each other for decades.
Why a box
I have been quietly dissatisfied with our boxes for years. The current cream-colored box is fine. It is dignified. It is well-made by a Guangzhou print partner we've used since 2024. But it is, in the end, a packaging object. It is not made of the same kind of slow material the bracelet inside it is made of.
The bracelet is real stone, hand-knotted on silk. The box should be — if I am being honest with myself about the work — a real material too. Something that ages alongside the piece. Something that, if a wearer keeps the box on her shelf for ten years, becomes a small artifact in its own right.
I had been carrying this dissatisfaction for about two years before I did anything about it. The reason I had not acted was that I did not know who could make what I wanted. Most box manufacturers, by the time they are scaled enough to make 1,200 boxes a year, are making boxes by machine. The honest small makers, by the time they are unscaled enough to make by hand, are making one box at a time and could not keep up with us.
Then Wei mentioned Mr. Lu. She had passed his workshop every morning on her walk to Mrs. Yang's atelier. She knew him by face. She did not know his work was unusual until she described it to me.
The first visit
I flew to Hangzhou in February of 2028 — a few months before Wei moved to Wenchang. Wei went with me; we visited Mrs. Yang together, and then Mrs. Yang walked us down the lane to Mr. Lu's workshop. The workshop is at the back of an unmarked building. You enter through a wooden door. The first room is small. The smell is — I don't know how to describe it — something like wet bark and quiet.
Mr. Lu does not speak English. My Mandarin is good but my Hangzhou dialect is poor. Mrs. Yang translated. I told him I made small custom pieces of jewelry in Hainan, that I had been thinking about packaging, that I wanted to know if he made boxes.
He did not make boxes. He had never made a box. He made sheets of mulberry paper, which were used by calligraphers and traditional bookbinders. The closest he came to a box was a sheet folded over a manuscript to protect it during transport.
I asked if he would consider making a small box, by folding. He thought about it for several minutes. He asked me how many boxes I needed per year. I said, at the time, about 800. He smiled politely. He said: "I can make 800 of any one thing per year, but only if it is one design. I cannot make 800 different designs."
I said yes — one design. The same design for every wearer.
He agreed to try. We spent the rest of that afternoon talking through what a folded paper box might look like, what dimensions it would need, what bracelet it would hold. I sketched on a notebook page. He nodded and adjusted my sketches with his pencil. By the end of the afternoon we had an outline.
The two years
The work, from that February afternoon to now, has taken just over two years. Most of it was Mr. Lu's. He had to invent a fold pattern he had never made. He had to adjust the weight of his paper — his standard paper is too thin for a box; a thicker paper requires more pulp time. He had to figure out how to make the inside of the box smooth enough that it does not catch on the linen pouch we put the bracelet in.
I sent samples to Hangzhou over the two years. He sent samples back to Wenchang. We discarded approximately seventy prototypes. The one we landed on is the eighty-third.
It is a small box — barely larger than the cream box it replaces. It is made of mulberry paper Mr. Lu makes from scratch. The lid lifts off as a single piece, not a hinge. The inside is unlined; the paper itself is the lining. The outside has a small embossed studio mark in one corner, which Mr. Lu's daughter cut a custom press for. There is no printing. The whole box is the color of pale cream — slightly different from the previous box because the paper is a different material — and over years, with handling, it will become a slightly warmer cream.
It is the most beautiful object I have ever shipped a piece in.
What it costs us, what it pays him
I want to write this part directly, because I think transparency about the economics matters.
Each box costs us about $9 USD to make. The previous box cost us about $4. So we are doubling our packaging cost, on roughly 1,200 boxes a year — about $6,000 in additional annual expense, before any other consideration.
We are paying for this in two ways. We are absorbing $4 of the cost into our margin (which was already tight). We are passing $1 of the cost into a small adjustment to the piece prices — about a 0.6% increase across the catalog, beginning with the August drop. Wearers who already have pieces will not see any change; only new orders.
From Mr. Lu's side, the work pays him approximately what it is worth, which is to say: enough to keep his workshop open, and to give his daughter a small reason to consider succession when the time comes. He was operating at about 60% capacity before our order; we have brought him to about 85%. He is not getting wealthy. He is getting sustained, which at his age and in his trade is the better word.
I think the math is fair. I think wearers who care about this kind of thing will think so too. If you don't think so, write to me and tell me. I will read it.
What this is the start of
I want to be careful here, because I do not want to overstate.
This is not a "platform for traditional craftsmen." We are not going to add ten more collaborations next year. SENMOMO will probably have, at most, three or four ongoing trade relationships outside our core team: the stone suppliers (we have spent six years tightening that list), the clasp engraver in Hangzhou (since 2024), now Mr. Lu, and possibly — possibly — one silk-dyer in southern Vietnam whose work I have been quietly considering. That is all. Adding more would dilute the relationships we have.
But the principle of the collaboration is one I want to name, because it is something I had not articulated until now. The principle is: small craft sustains other small craft. Mrs. Yang trained Wei, who came to me. Mrs. Yang sustained Mr. Lu, whose workshop is across the lane. Mr. Lu now sustains us. We sustain — through the wearers who buy what we make — the wearers who go on to wear his paper. The boxes, in their second lives, become storage for letters or pressed flowers or other small things, and Mr. Lu's paper continues its existence inside a wearer's home long after our bracelet has left the box.
This is a network. It does not scale. It compounds.
I would like SENMOMO to be a node in this network, in the way Mrs. Yang's atelier and Mr. Lu's workshop are nodes. Not the center. Not the hub. A node. The work survives because the network sustains the nodes that sustain the work. That is the only way slow trade has ever continued.
What you will see, in August
If your piece ships from August 2030 onward, it will arrive in Mr. Lu's box. The first wearer to receive one will be — as it happens — the wearer in Cape Town we mentioned in December's entry. Her piece has been in the studio since January, waiting for the new boxes to be ready. We told her about the delay. She wrote back to say she'd rather wait than be the second wearer to get the new box. So she will be the first.
The box will arrive with a small printed insert explaining who Mr. Lu is and where the paper comes from. The insert is folded from a single sheet — Mr. Lu's idea — and is itself made of a slightly thinner version of the same mulberry paper. It is not a marketing piece. It is just a small introduction, in case you would like to know whose hands made the box, in addition to whose hands made the bracelet.
I am proud of this. I have been working toward something like this since before the studio was open to the public. It took two years to land. I think it was worth the two years.
Thank you, Mr. Lu, and Mr. Lu's daughter, and Wang. Thank you, Mrs. Yang, for the introduction. Thank you, Wei, for walking past Mr. Lu's workshop every morning and noticing what he made.