About Alya Pearls Studio

Where every pearl finds its story — and yours begins here.

A long overdue introduction — everything about who we are and how we became this studio.
In 2025, on our third anniversary, I wanted to reintroduce myself to old friends and new ones

1 | A girl from a pearl town

I was born in a small town built around pearls.

My childhood was lakes and mud on my knees, swimming in the water, fishing on quiet afternoons, and following my grandfather as he checked on the mussels in their cages. While other kids grew up around concrete and traffic, I grew up surrounded by shells and the soft shine of nacre.

My grandfather began farming pearls in 1972, learning early techniques and slowly improving them over the decades. What started as a tiny family workshop has, over three generations, grown into a company with 6 Pearl farms and more than 700 acres of water surface in China, plus a shared stake in a Tahitian pearl farm in Indonesia.

In many ways, I didn’t choose pearls. I was born into them.

I write this page not just to introduce who we are,
but to tell you why pearls became the way I speak to the world.

2 | Leaving the water — and finding it again

In 2016, I decided to pause university and take a long gap year.
That “year” became almost three years.

I traveled across Asia and North America, learning more from people and cities and coastlines than I ever expected. In 2019, I went to New Zealand on a working holiday. Then COVID arrived, borders closed, and I found myself unexpectedly living in New Zealand for four years.

After I finally returned to China in 2023, I did what seemed most natural: I joined the family business more seriously and started working in traditional pearl trade.

We sold large volumes of pearls to wholesalers. It made sense on paper — we had a strong supply chain, good prices, and I did, honestly, make some money. But most of my days were spent replying to very similar emails, negotiating quantities and prices, checking quality, packing boxes. There wasn’t much human connection.

I started to wonder:

If I disappear from this work, would anything feel different?
Does what I do actually mean anything to anyone?

That was my quiet crisis. I was surrounded by pearls, but I didn’t feel connected to them anymore.

3 | The moment everything shifted

One day, in a small vintage shop, I saw two old photographs.

In both, women were wearing simple pearl pieces — nothing extravagant, nothing staged. Just pearls on skin, in their own lives. And suddenly it hit me:

Pearls are not finished when they leave the water.
They are finished when they meet someone’s skin.

I realized I didn’t want to spend my whole life sending pearls away in bulk, never knowing where they ended up. I wanted to see them on people — on real faces, in real stories.

So I opened an Instagram account.

At first it was just me, posting slowly, answering messages in two languages, packing orders by myself. But something changed almost immediately: I began to meet people.

Chen and Saema from Singapore.
Linda from the UK.
Gianna from Cyprus.
Customers and now friends from the US and Australia.

The first time a customer sent me a photo of herself wearing our earrings, I stared at it for a long time. I still remember the picture Handan sent me last month: her and her daughter, both wearing our pearl studs. There was nothing staged about it — just a simple, beautiful moment.

That’s when I knew:

This is what I want to do.
Not just sell pearls —
but help people find the ones that feel like theirs.

From that feeling came our studio line:

Where every pearl finds its story — and yours begins here.

4 | From family farms to a small, stubborn studio

As the studio slowly grew, I met two women who are now at the heart of everything we do: Lulu and Sheiry.

We come from very different backgrounds, but we share one problem (or gift): we’ve all seen too many pearls, and our standards are very high.

Lulu sees the world in two languages at once.
Sheiry hears flaws the way others hear music.

• I (Alya) grew up around the farms and now bridge our family’s resources with the international world — designing, working with clients, and building the studio’s voice.
• Lulu has lived in China, the US, Japan, and New Zealand. She has a rare cross-cultural eye, helps refine our aesthetics, and many of you know her from our Instagram and TikTok Lives.
• Sheiry is a jewelry designer and a perfectionist in the gentlest way. She can spot a tiny flaw on a 2mm pearl, match pairs from hundreds in minutes, and quietly refuses anything that doesn’t meet her standard. At home, she is a warm new mother who cooks beautifully. At work, she is ice-cold with quality.

Together, we made a decision:

We would only use high-grade pearls — 4A and 5A —
but we would do it in a way that most people could still afford.

That’s why we focus on freshwater pearls instead of making sea pearls our main line. Freshwater pearls allow us to keep most of our core designs under $200, while still maintaining strong luster, clean surfaces, and careful matching.

We want you to choose your favorite piece without feeling afraid of the price.

5 | A season of almost losing everything

There is one story I can’t leave out, because it changed how I see my work and my community.

Last year, during what became the most desperate two months of my life, I clicked on a phishing email.

My Instagram account — the one where I had met all of you, where every message and every story was — was stolen.

The hacker changed my email and my phone number.
Instagram and Meta support felt like shouting into a void. For weeks, I could not reach anyone. I watched as my access disappeared, and with it, my connection to everyone I had met through the studio.

I barely slept in those final two weeks. I honestly almost gave up.
Could a small person like me really win against a giant company? Could a letter even reach them?

In the end, I went through legal channels, working with AG to send formal complaints and legal notices to Meta. It felt impossible and slightly ridiculous — but then, one day:

I received an email from Meta.

They reset my password, restored my data, and gave me access back.
When I logged in and saw familiar names again, it felt unreal.

I called almost everyone I could, just to say:
“I’m back. I didn’t lose you.”

It sounds dramatic, but it truly felt like someone had handed my life back to me.

Alya Pearls stopped being “just” a small brand.
It became a family — the Alya Family — and I understood how fragile, and how precious, that connection is.

6 | Pearls, girls, and giving back

In May 2024, I wanted to find a small but real way to give something back — not just to customers, but to girls who might never otherwise touch a pearl.

Through CAMFED (Campaign for Female Education), I started a simple promise:

For every order we receive,
we donate a pair of pearl studs to a girl in Africa.

So far, we’ve sent out over 300 pairs.

It makes me quietly happy to think of this:
somewhere far away, a girl is putting on her first pearl earrings,
and somehow, a little piece of our lake and our lives has reached her.

It’s my way of closing the circle —
between my grandfather’s ponds,
our studio table,
and the wider world.

Beauty matters — but shared beauty changes things.

7 | What we believe

We’re still a very small studio.
Your order doesn’t pass through a big warehouse.
It passes through a few very specific hands — mine, Lulu’s, and especially Sheiry’s.

Here is what we believe in:

• High standards, not hype.
  We focus on luster, surface, and matching — not on shouting “perfect” at everything.
• Freshwater, intentionally.
  We love sea pearls, but we choose freshwater as our main line so that more people can wear truly good pearls without fear of the price tag.
• Honest grading.
  When we say 4A or 5A, it’s based on real criteria, not marketing.
• Human connection.
  We answer messages ourselves. We remember names. We celebrate your photos.
• Slow beauty.
  We would rather ship fewer pieces, picked carefully, than grow fast and forget why we began.

8 | Who we design for

Some of our customers are buying their very first real pearl necklace.

Some are seasoned jewelry lovers, designers, or resellers who know exactly what they’re looking for.

Some are mothers buying something to pass down.
Some are daughters buying something as a quiet gift to themselves.

We hold space for all of them —
for the curious beginner who’s just learning what luster means,
and for the trained eye that can spot a surface mark from far away.

If you’re someone who wants your jewelry to feel calm, intentional, and quietly bright, you’re in the right place.

9 | Looking ahead

We don’t dream of becoming the biggest pearl brand.

We would rather stay small enough to remember your name,
to recognize you when you come back for a second piece,
to know that when we choose a strand,
we are choosing it for a person, not an order number.

There are many things we still want to do:

• share more stories from the farms and the studio
• create more educational content so you can understand pearls without feeling intimidated
• continue our donations and expand the ways we give back
• keep refining our designs, so they feel like a natural part of your life — not something that only comes out for special occasions

But at the heart of it, our promise remains simple:

Where every pearl finds its story — and yours begins here.

If you ever need help choosing your first piece
or your next one,
you can always write to me.

With love,
Alya & the studio.