Chapter 4 — The People Beside Me: Lulu and Sheiry

Our Studio Is Small, But Never Alone

Alya Pearls has never been a “big team” kind of story.

It’s always been a few people, close enough to hear each other’s sighs, notice each other’s tired eyes, and pass each other a cup of tea without needing to ask. We work with tiny details—millimeters, undertones, surface texture, a single reflection under light—but the way we work together is much bigger than that.

This chapter is about the two people who quietly hold the studio with me: Lulu and Sheiry.

Lulu — The Bridge I Didn’t Know I Needed

I met Lulu in New Zealand, in a place that doesn’t sound glamorous at all: a mussel factory.

She was in charge of QC. If you met her that day, you wouldn’t have guessed how much life she’d already lived. She looked approachable, almost ordinary—slightly chubby in the sweetest way, wearing work boots and a white lab coat, focused on the job in front of her. Just someone doing careful work, quietly.

But Lulu has this hidden depth.

One day, we started talking about her younger sister. Her sister loved traveling too, studied jewelry design in college, and somehow ended up in the most unexpected path—after serving in the U.S. Army, she went into banking and business. Lulu told me so casually, like it was nothing, but I could tell she’d always been the kind of person who offers the thinking, the structure, the calm logic behind someone else’s dream.

She also told me she used to love making handmade dolls—soft, careful work with yarn and needles. But when you travel and work for years, you can’t carry a life’s worth of materials with you. Some passions don’t disappear… they just get packed away.

That’s Lulu in a sentence: she carries both practicality and softness, even when life keeps moving.

In our studio, Lulu became a bridge in the most important ways—language and taste.

I grew up around pearls. I knew them by instinct. But my vocabulary was local—how we describe pearls in our town, the words we use in Chinese to talk about luster and tone, the tiny differences that only show up when you’ve held pearls in your hands since childhood.

Lulu taught me how to say those things in English.

Not textbook English—real, usable words. The names for different undertones. The right way to describe luster. The way to explain findings, settings, and design details so overseas customers could actually feel what we meant.

And then there’s her aesthetic.

Because she has lived in both Japan and the U.S., she sees pearls from more than one cultural lens. She tends to love softer, gentler light—especially non-nucleated pearls—rather than the more dramatic pink-blue glow that Edison pearls sometimes carry. But when it comes to metal choices and findings, her taste becomes bolder. She’s drawn to stronger forms, and she truly loves gold.

That contrast helped shape us in the beginning more than people realize.

Some of our best early decisions—the way we balanced softness with modern energy—came from Lulu quietly saying, “What if we tried this?” and staying patient while I learned to see it too.

Sheiry — Warm Hands, Ruthless Standards

If Lulu is the bridge, Sheiry is the measure.

Her personality has two sides, and anyone who works with her learns this quickly.

In life, Sheiry is warm. She cooks beautifully. She notices people’s feelings. After she became a mother, that warmth somehow became even deeper—she has the steady, older-sister energy that makes a studio feel like a place you can breathe in.

But at the work table?

Sheiry becomes almost… icy.

Not unkind—just completely uncompromising.

Sometimes I think she might have a little perfectionism wired into her bones. And honestly, she probably does. But for our customers, it’s the best thing that could happen.

Because Sheiry doesn’t just match pearls by size and general color the way most people do.

She matches the light.

When we pair earrings, most of us would look for the same shape, similar size, and a close tone—and that would already be “good enough.” But Sheiry will look closer and insist that the two pearls carry the same kind of overtone—the same cloud of light.

If one reflects slightly pink and the other slightly blue, even if they look “almost identical,” she’ll stop everything.

There have been times when we finally thought we were done—after sorting through around two kilos, choosing a hundred pearls we felt good about—only for Sheiry to say, calmly:

“Again.”

And then she’ll remove half of them.

She is terrifying in the most respectful way.

And lately, as her child grows, we’ve watched her strict side show up at home too. We joke quietly that if Sheiry keeps raising her daughter like this, she’ll learn CAD early and end up doing 3D jewelry modeling for us someday. (We laugh… but honestly, it might happen.)

Why We Work This Way

We never sat down and decided, “Let’s be strict.”

It happened naturally—because we’ve seen too much.

We’ve seen too many pearls on the market that look fine in photos but go dull in real life. For me, surface flaws are normal—most real pearls have them. That part doesn’t scare me.

But luster matters.

If the reflection isn’t continuous—if the light breaks, if the surface looks chalky—then to me, it stops feeling like jewelry. It becomes just a bead.

So sometimes, we simply don’t sell.

Even if an order has already been placed, if we truly can’t find the right pearls in stock at that moment, we’ll refund rather than send something we don’t believe in. That’s not a marketing line. It’s just how we sleep at night.

In the beginning, we were almost too idealistic. Our website only offered 5A pearls. And yes—the pieces were beautiful. But the average order quickly climbed above $300, and I began to hear the same message again and again on my Stories:

“They’re stunning… but I can’t afford them right now.”

That mattered to me.

Because I didn’t want pearls to feel like something only a few people could have. So we introduced 4A options—not as “lower quality,” but as a more realistic balance: still bright, still beautiful, still hand-selected—just with a little more flexibility in things like shape, tone, and selection range.

And we leaned into freshwater pearls, because they allow us to keep most everyday pieces within reach—often under $200—without letting go of what we consider non-negotiable: a living, beautiful glow.

If you have any questions about how we define our 4A and 5A grades, please read this article 4A OR 5A, or details about our Classic Beauty Necklace

A Growing Studio, A Shared Direction

Over time, our team has slowly grown. Friends and coworkers like Ethan, Tina, Wenzheng, and others have joined in different parts of the work.

And Sheiry’s daughter—very seriously—has already shown a suspicious amount of interest in pearls.

I hope, little by little, I’ll get to introduce more of the people behind the scenes. Because pearls don’t travel alone. They move through hands, through conversations, through tiny acts of care that most customers never see.

For now, this is the heart of it:

We’re a small studio.
We take our time.
We look closely.
We care about each other.

And we hope every pearl finds its story—
and that you’ll be part of it too.

Because if you’re here, reading this, then maybe…
your story with us has already started.

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