Before
For a long time before I started making bracelets, I bought them. Online. From photographs that looked nothing like what arrived. I'm not exaggerating to say I owned twelve crystal bracelets I never wore — they sat in a small ceramic bowl on my dresser, looking pretty enough in theory, but lacking something I couldn't quite name. The stones were real. The clasps worked. They weren't broken. They were just not mine.
I think about this now and I realize the word for what they lacked is address. They weren't sent to me; they were sent to whoever ordered next. There was no person behind them. No one had picked the specific rose quartz I was holding from any number of other rose quartz beads. No one had thought about what I might want.
If I sound resentful about this, I don't mean to. The bracelets weren't bad. The brands weren't predatory. I was a typical consumer of mass-produced jewelry in the 2020s — the relationship between maker and wearer had been severed for so long that nobody noticed it was missing.
But I noticed.
The decision
In early 2024 I was 34 and working in a job I'd been at for nine years. I had taken up beading as a private practice during the pandemic, in the way many people took up bread baking — quietly, with embarrassment, expecting to abandon it. I didn't abandon it. By 2023 I was making bracelets for friends, then for friends-of-friends. The pieces from that period are not for sale; they were small gifts.
One of those friends, a woman named Lin who would later join the studio, told me she'd kept hers in a small dish near her desk. Not worn — kept. She said she liked looking at it. She said it felt different from the bracelets she'd bought.
I asked her why. She thought about it for a while and said: "Because you knew it was for me."
I left my job in March 2024. I won't pretend the decision was clean — it wasn't. I had savings; I had a small apartment in Wenchang on the Hainan coast that my parents had bought me when I graduated college; I had no children and no mortgage. I was lucky. I am still lucky. But the choice to begin SENMOMO was not nothing. It was a real choice with real costs, and I want to be honest that I'd been thinking about it for at least eighteen months before I made it.
The first piece
Piece #001 was made on June 14, 2024. A friend asked for a bracelet for her mother's sixtieth birthday. She told me a few things about her mother — that she liked rose quartz, that she had been a kindergarten teacher for thirty years, that she rarely bought jewelry for herself.
I made it slowly. I picked nine stones — five rose quartz, three strawberry quartz, one small moonstone hidden near the clasp. I strung it on hand-knotted silk. I wrote a small note about why I'd picked the moonstone. I photographed it. I asked my friend whether her mother would like it. My friend said yes.
Her mother wore it to her birthday dinner that weekend. My friend sent me a photograph. The mother was crying. I cried too, looking at the photograph. It was the first time something I had made — really mine, start to finish — had reached someone it was for.
I knew then this was going to be the thing I did.
The year of figuring it out
The first year was slow. I made about forty pieces. I had no website. Orders came through WeChat. I worked alone in the apartment, the trays out on the kitchen table, photographing on a small piece of cream linen taped to the wall.
I made mistakes. I bought stones from suppliers I would later stop working with. I undercharged. I sent a piece to a wearer in Beijing whose silk thread broke within six months — that was the day I switched to the heavier silk we use now, and the day I committed to the lifetime re-stringing promise.
By the end of 2024 I'd produced piece #042 (Her Tenderness, which became our most-ordered design), the studio had moved into the second floor of a small building in Wenchang, and Daisy had joined part-time to handle shipping. The studio looked, in November 2024, like the studio looks today, except with fewer wearers and less certainty.
What I learned in that year — what I'd say to anyone considering a similar move — is that the work is not the hard part. The hard part is having the patience to do the work well for long enough that someone notices.
Now
It is now late 2026. We have made 127 pieces. We have three people: me, Daisy, Lin (who left her job in Beijing in 2026 to handle our web infrastructure and write the journal copy I don't write). We have one cat, but she's not on payroll.
The studio is two rooms on the second floor of a quiet building in Wenchang. The east-facing window is what I most appreciate about the space. There is a single bench against the long wall, with the stone trays out. There is a smaller table for Daisy when she comes in. There is a separate room with the printer and the shipping supplies. There are two chairs, one for me and one for the wearer, on the few days a year someone comes to visit in person.
We will open to international wearers on February 6, 2027 — the new moon nearest February 1. The first public drop will be Her Tenderness, April Rain, and First Light. The 200 wearers who joined our pre-launch list will receive pieces #128 through #200, in the order they joined. Then we'll continue with #201, #202, and so on, at the pace of three to five new orders per month.
If everything goes well, by the end of 2027 we will have shipped about 80 international orders. By the end of 2028, maybe 150. By the time we reach piece #999 — probably 2029 — we'll close Chapter One and start Chapter Two with a new numbering sequence. Chapter One numbers will be permanent in the archive. They won't repeat, ever.
What we believe
A bracelet should have a name. Not "Model A" or "SKU-403." Yours might be Her Tenderness or April Rain or something we name together. The name is part of what you bought.
You should see what you're getting before you get it. We photograph every piece and send it for approval before shipping. If you don't love it, we adjust. There's no extra charge for this; it's the work.
Technology should serve craft, not replace it. Our AI assistant helps wearers find combinations that fit their intent. But I review every design before it's made. AI suggests. mo decides.
Slow things are worth waiting for. A SENMOMO bracelet takes 7-10 days door-to-door, depending on where you live. Not because we are slow — because we are careful. The wait is part of the gift.
The piece you buy today should be the same price five years from now. We don't discount, ever. The wearer who bought today and the wearer who buys next decade pay the same price for the same work. Discounting is the slow tax we put on our most loyal customers, and we refuse.
An archive is a promise. Every piece we make has a permanent number. We hold the record of every piece — what stones, what date, what was written about it — for as long as we exist, and beyond. The number is yours. It doesn't move.
Five years from now
I think about this often. By 2031, SENMOMO will be seven years old. We will probably still be three or four people. We will probably still be in Wenchang. We will have shipped — at the cadence we're committed to — maybe 600 to 900 pieces total. That's small. It is meant to be small.
I think we will have made some mistakes I haven't anticipated. I think we will have lost some wearers we wished we'd kept. I think the journal will have grown to maybe 25 entries, and we'll have started inviting other voices in occasionally — other makers, other wearers writing about what their piece has done. I think the studio visit program will have brought maybe 150 wearers in person.
I think someone will have written a piece in a small magazine about SENMOMO and gotten the brand mostly wrong, and we will have politely corrected them, and they will have published a correction. I think we will have lost the most expensive batch of moonstone we ever bought to a customs error, and we will have laughed about it eventually.
I think we will not be famous. I think we will be quietly known among the small group of wearers — maybe 1,500 worldwide — for whom this kind of object is what they want, and we will be deeply unknown to everyone else. I think this is the right shape for what we are.
Why this page exists
You asked. Not literally — I'm not pretending to read your mind — but: enough wearers have written to ask the full story that I felt I owed it to the brand to write it down. So now it's written. It's roughly true. Some details I've changed for privacy. The basic shape is what happened.
If you decide to wear something we made, this is the studio behind it. Three people. One bench. East-facing window. Trays of stones in glass jars. A printer in the next room. An archive that grows by one entry every few days. A small, considered effort to make the kind of object the world doesn't quite make anymore.
Thank you for reading. Now, if you'd like, you can write back to us. We'll write back to you.