Hi, my name is Chloe Beaumont, one half of the mother-daughter duo behind Beaumont Jewelry Collective.
Ever since I was thirteen years old, I told people I wanted to be a jewelry designer when I grew up. Now I’m thirty-one, and I co-own a jewelry business, which still feels wild to say out loud. The journey here was anything but straightforward, but looking back, every twist helped shape the kind of work I do today and the kind of ethical jewelry I want to put into the world.
My story begins in Westport, Connecticut. I went to Staples High School, which happened to have an incredible arts program, including jewelry design classes. I was the kid who stayed late, who wanted to learn one more technique, who could not stop sketching ideas in the margins of notebooks. I loved the way jewelry could hold meaning. A piece could be small enough to fit in your hand and still carry a whole story.
One day in 2013, someone from the Lux Bond & Green Jewelers team came and met a bunch of students. When I walked up, shook his hand, and told him about my big dreams, he looked me in the eye and said, “There’s a place for you in this industry, if you want it.”
Those words landed like a spark. They made the dream feel real, not just a phase or a cute hobby. I held onto them.
My bright-eyed, bushy-tailed self went on to intern at Mitchells of Westport during my senior year. Through one of the wonderful salespeople there, I was encouraged to secure another internship for Caroline Ellen in New York City.
To say that time was eye-opening would be an understatement. I was shown original Cartier jeweler benches in the Diamond District, watched master engravers at work, and delivered Caroline’s loose colored gems, waxes, molds, and finished pieces all over the city. Looking back now, it shocks me how much trust Caroline had in me.
She even let me “color in” her black-and-white sketches in a copy of her massive sketchbook, created as a backup in case one got damaged. I was truly living my dreams, soaking up anything anyone told me like the baby-faced seventeen-year-old I was. I started to understand that jewelry was not only about sparkle. It was about craftsmanship, relationships, and the responsibility that comes with making something people will wear during the most meaningful moments of their lives.
Fast forward to December 2018. I was a senior in college and about to graduate from Baylor University after transferring from Miami University (of Ohio) my sophomore year.
My BFA degree was within reach, and I was still dead set on pursuing my dream: going to the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) in Carlsbad, California for Bench Jewelry. After that, I would open my own business and finally, after all those years of school, get to make my own designs.
Nothing and no one could stop me.
Or so I thought.
Little did I know, my dream was about to die.
Three months into the Bench Jewelry program at GIA, I realized I could never, ever be a bench jeweler. My body simply was not cut out for it, and it was screaming at me every single day to stop.
It was a slow build up. First my wrists. Then my back. Then my neck. After three months of sitting at the bench from 8am to 4pm every weekday, my entire body hurt. I showed up to school with neon pink KT athletic tape all over my wrists because they felt unstable and painful. It was the only way I could keep going and set stones without bursting into tears.
Which I did, many days after class. I would call and text my mom often, hysterical and upset.
“Mom, I want to quit. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t know why I’m in pain all the time,” I would tell her.
She empathized, but encouraged me to push through and finish the remaining three months. After that, we could figure out what my next steps would be.
I was devastated. I had never felt more frustrated in my life.
Why was my body betraying me?
Everything I had worked toward since I was 13 felt like it was going down the drain. Every time my sweet GIA professors told me, “Chloe, you’re quite good at setting princess cuts,” or “Your polish on this piece looks really good,” I became even more irate and resentful.
A ring from a project during the Bench Jewelry course at GIA. Photos by Chloe Beaumont.
It did not matter how good I was. My body was failing me. Every time they demonstrated the correct way to grip a tool, I could not replicate it. I had to hold it differently to achieve the same result. My benchmates started to worry with how frequently I had to take breaks just to stretch and push through discomfort, while they were a little stiff but otherwise fine. It would be another four years before I would learn I was extremely hypermobile, meaning the joints in my body lack the stability they need and frequently overextend and over-rotate.
With the help of frequent massage therapy, I made it through and graduated from the course.
At my graduation, as I was about to leave with my mom, one of my instructors called out to me. We both turned around.
“Chloe, don’t forget. You have star power,” he said.
I was floored. Star power? I definitely did not feel like I deserved that description. Maybe he could sense how defeated I felt, and wanted to encourage me that I was more than my disappointing, uncooperative body.
Did I really have potential to be a star at something else?
I knew I was good at jewelry sales, because I worked in retail throughout college and during my free time at GIA. Rita Famulare of Famulare Jewelers had hired me part-time, and I learned so much working for her.
One day at Famulare, I spotted a star necklace in the consignment case. It was a dainty little gold piece, covered in tiny diamonds, dangling off a gold chain.
Star power. My instructor’s comment came rushing back.
I decided to extend my time at GIA and begin the Graduate Gemology course to become a certified Gemologist. And the star necklace? I bought it for myself and wore it every day as a reminder: I was going to figure out my path, one way or another.
Ah, Covid. You see that date and you already know what is coming.
When Covid hit and the global shutdown began, I had gone home to Connecticut for spring break after passing the Diamonds portion of my Graduate Gemology program. What we thought would be a couple weeks off turned into more weeks, then months.
In the midst of it all, the George Floyd protests were raging, understandably.
My family made the decision to remotely pack up my California apartment with the help of family friends and move my life back to the East Coast. All my things, aside from a box of my most valuable possessions, were in a moving truck headed to us.
My mom got a phone call one day. As I watched her on the phone, her face went white and still. My things had made it as far as the suburbs of El Paso, Texas when the moving truck apparently “spontaneously caught fire.” Everything on it was declared a total loss. They were so sorry, the caller said, and would be sending us a check.
Could they provide images of the truck to prove it was as bad as they said?
No, they could not. “Third party rules,” the caller said. She sounded mortified.
My mom was devastated. As for me, I decided to accept it.
“Well, that’s one way to get a clean slate,” I later laughed. It was so insane, all I could do was laugh. Nothing was going how I planned. It felt like I was starting over in every way imaginable.
By winter of 2020, I was losing my mind with boredom and needed something that pulled me back into the jewelry industry. I had recently launched an online blog of sorts called “The Source” with a team at the Community for Ethical Jewelry (formerly Ethical Metalsmiths). I loved interviewing industry people and writing, especially about transparency and ethics in the jewelry industry, but it was not enough to scratch the itch of building something everyday in person.
I ended up taking an Operations Coordinator job working for Emily Phillippy at Emily Chelsea Jewelry in Philly, and I moved down from Connecticut as fast as I could.
I thought, how different could Philly be from New York?
The reality: Philly was not New York. Not even close.
On top of that, we were still deep in the pandemic and no one was socializing. A couple months later, my boss Emily told us she was pregnant. My coworker Kate and I were thrilled for her, but we also had to get serious about what the business would need while she was on maternity leave.
Sam was quickly hired, and then Natalie joined. We were a small team, but we were fierce. Any problem that came along, we handled together. We got good at solving the unexpected.
I learned a lot from Emily, and I learned a lot as I went: how to manage artisan vendors on Philly’s jewelry row, how to really listen to clients, how to adjust production timelines so someone could have their dream engagement ring in time. It was challenging, but I credit Emily for three main things I carry with me forever:
Emily and I are still friends, and we see each other multiple times a year.
In 2022, I took a job in Seattle, Washington, for ANZA Gems, a wholesale gem company founded and led by Monica Stephenson.
A big move was coming and an even bigger experience: the opportunity to accompany Monica to Tanzania and Kenya to help her buy gemstones directly from women miners. For the first time, I would see what ethically sourced gemstones can look like when relationships, transparency, and fair pay are part of the process from the beginning.
My life was about to drastically change again, and I could not wait.
I moved to Seattle to get ready to start my job at ANZA, and my mom came with me because she is that kind of mom. Monica met with us and promised she would take care of me in case anything happened while we were in East Africa. I had moved so fast that none of us had time to get me fully set up on healthcare.
Which, honestly, I did not care about. I was going to fly to Nairobi with Monica my first week on the job.
We did not plan for it to happen in that slightly bonkers way, it is just how the stars aligned. It also says a lot about Monica. She was bold, trusting, and mission-driven. I was not a perfect stranger, either. We had worked together on The Source, and Monica was President of Ethical Metalsmiths at the time.
I was about to have an adventure that would shape the course of my path for good.
Ten hours to Amsterdam from Seattle. Layover. Ten more hours to Nairobi.
We made it to Africa!
The next morning we woke up and caught a train to Voi, Kenya, the largest town near the Umba Valley gem mining areas we would be visiting. It was there that I met Lou-Anna Piat, whose father runs the family gem company Maison Piat. Lou-Anna flew down from Paris to join us for the Moyo Gem Market Days, the whole reason we were there.
Moyo Gems is a colored gemstone initiative started by Monica Stephenson, Cristina Villegas and Pact International, and Stuart Pool of Nineteen48. Moyo focuses on buying ethically sourced gemstones directly from artisanal women miners in Tanzania and Kenya, giving them the opportunity to work with international buyers and receive a fair price for gems they mined themselves.
Local brokers are also involved, and by the time I attended, the program was holding its 12th Market Day.
Rainbow colored sapphire rough (left) and garnet rough (right) being weighed and assessed at a Tanzania Moyo Market Day. Photos by Chloe Beaumont.
Both the Kenyan and Tanzanian legs usually included a 2 to 2.5 hour drive every morning to the village where miners lived. Then, after eight to ten hours of buying rough, we returned to the hotel, ate dinner, crashed, and did it again.
The days were long, but we did not care. Meeting the miners and seeing the rough gemstones they brought in made it worth it. I had never seen gemstone rough before, so that alone was an unforgettable education.
East Africa is home to so many different varieties of gems. We sat there while miners brought aquamarine, sapphire, garnet, moonstone, citrine, amethyst, ruby, pink spinel, and zircon in a rainbow of colors. Those stones were not just objects. They represented labor, skill, and communities that too often get left out of the story when jewelry is sold.
A rhodolite garnet rough in the shape of a heart and Chloe holding a handful of garnet. Photos by Chloe Beaumont.
My time at ANZA Gems was marked by so many brand new experiences, including selling loose gemstones at Ethical Gem Fairs in Denver, Tucson, and Brooklyn. I met wonderful clients who truly cared about where their gems were coming from and loved supporting a company whose values matched their own. That was my reminder that ethical jewelry is not a niche. It is what more and more people genuinely want, especially when they understand the impact.
Monica Stephenson (left) and Chloe Beaumont (right) at the Ethical Gem Fair in Tucson. A heart of Moyo Sapphires in a rainbow of colors. Photos courtesy of Chloe Beaumont.
These values of transparency, traceability, and investment in people and artisanal mining communities are the same values I carried with me when I left ANZA to start Beaumont Jewelry Collective with my mom. When someone asks me why I care so much about ethically sourced gemstones, it is because I have looked into the eyes of the people who make that supply chain possible.
My journey in the jewelry industry, from retail to wholesale across the US, turned out to be invaluable. It gave me new ideas and dreams I never would have dared to dream.
Sometimes, one dream has to die for another, better one to be born.
If you persist through the heartbreak of your path not unfolding the way you imagined, you just might create a new dream beyond what you ever could have wanted for yourself.
Beaumont Jewelry Collective is the culmination of all of that for me. A jewelry collective centered around purpose-driven pieces that give back and reinvest in artisanal miners like the ones I met in Africa. We believe ethical jewelry should feel personal, beautiful, and grounded in truth. We believe ethically sourced gemstones deserve to be celebrated not only for their color and rarity, but for the people and practices behind them. When we work with gold, we prioritize responsible sourcing, including Fairmined gold when available, because materials matter.
Thank you for reading my whole story. I hope, if nothing else, you feel encouraged to keep saying yes, stay curious, and discover what you are capable of.
Keep sparkling,
Chloe Beaumont
Co-founder of Beaumont Jewelry Collective