Armenta

Armenta

Emily Armenta traded at Morgan Stanley, then wrote the business plan for her jewellery company as a class assignment during her MBA at Rice, and launched it in Houston in 2001. The work is built on mixing oxidised silver with gold and setting micromosaics, ancient beads and enamel patinas into it.

Jewelry

The house style is deliberately dark: oxidised silver against eighteen-karat yellow and rose gold, with micromosaics, artifacts and enamel patinas doing the colour work. Armenta calls the two halves of it Old World and New World, and launched a collection under the latter name in 2011. It looks nothing like the polished fine-jewellery norm, which is the point.

More Jewelry

The production model is the most interesting thing here. Everything is handcrafted in-house in a ten-thousand-square-foot Houston studio, and the company runs the Armenta Atelier, its own curriculum training disadvantaged women in Old World jewellery technique. By 2021 the company reported employing more than two hundred people and making over six thousand pieces a year.

Our honest take

Jewellery has reportedly been worn by Halle Berry, Miley Cyrus and Queen Rania of Jordan, though without named events attached. The company is no longer purely founder-owned; filings record private-equity involvement through Batson Prairie Capital, with Armenta still over the design. Buy the mixed-metal pieces, which are unmistakable, and know that the training workshop behind them is real.