About
It all started when…
Merridee Cram's journey to becoming one of Australia's most sought after designer jewelers began as a ten-year-old selling enamel jewelry to her teachers. Most of them purchased more out of benevolence than love for the pieces. A lot has changed since then as most of Cram's jewelry including a spectacular piece she likes to call the “Eureka' necklace is made to commission.
"I call it the 'Eureka' necklace, because when anyone saw it - absolutely covered in diamonds, with a large opal and pink sapphires - their jaw would drop - and they’d be temporarily gobsmacked, thinking, ‘WOW’."
Cram's earliest memories of jewelry making go back to the mid 60's and taking classes at the Willoughby Workshop Arts Centre in Sydney, where her Mother would drop her off when she went shopping at Grace Brothers which was the only large Department Store shop on Sydney's North Shore at the time. It was there that she learned to make the enamel jewelry she sold to her teachers, one who recognized a creative spark and who began to teach her to work with silver during the lunch hour.
When she left school at 16 years of age she looked for work as a jeweler because “I was always artsy, but I needed to have a career where I could make money too - being a jeweler allowed that".
After two years studying at Randwick's Technical and Further Education (TAFE) School of Design, she was offered an apprenticeship at a large jewelry "production house - 20 jewelers working together to make pieces non stop in prescribed designs, not allowing for individual creativity but teaching me invaluable efficiency and technical skills".
She lasted two years at this conveyor-belt-type-jewelry-factory before finding work as an apprentice to a handmade artisan specialist jeweler, who allowed her to design and make her own pieces.
She branched out on her own setting up her namesake brand in 1982, working out of premises she rented from a retail jeweler.
Her first big break came within six months when her self entered single piece won a prestigious De Beers Diamond Design Award. It was common at the time for merchants to provide sponsorship and enter multiple pieces, because they could afford to have the non-winning entries pulled apart and then re-worked with extra diamonds for sale or subsequent competition entries. Cram went on to win the competition in 1987, 89, 91, 93 and 95, all without merchant sponsorship.
Diamonds remained her jewelry stone of choice until 2005 when she was invited to judge the famous biannual Lightning Ridge Opal Festival jewellery competition.
She found the stone to be “so intriguing" that she began to work with it, winning competition awards six times.
“I use a lot of organic motifs, I have a very untidy and free flowing mind, and I like to feel the piece I’m creating - from hand-drawing to hand-making everything. This is probably why I like opals - the organic uniqueness of each piece." she said.
With each competition win her clientele grew and once they were clientele, “most became regulars that have been with me a long time, and then there is often generational work - the children of those people come to me too," she said.
"More women are buying their own jewellery now - it was always career women buying pieces with me but now even more so - they’re buying statement pieces for their own enjoyment, to mark special occasions, or upgrading and remodelling pieces they've grown tired of.”