Cleo Vance

Cleo grew up in Portland, Oregon, the daughter of a thrift-store owner and a philosophy professor who never quite meshed but gave her an eye for hidden value and a love of sharp questions. She spent her teens sketching in the margins of textbooks and haunting estate sales, collecting broken jewelry and old silverware. At nineteen, she dropped out of a graphic design program to apprentice under a retired jeweler in Seattle, learning to solder, set stones, and turn raw metal into something worth keeping. Now she runs a small studio out of a converted garage, selling custom pieces online and at alternative markets—daggers, crescent moons, anatomical hearts, chains heavy enough to mean something.

Her work is her love language: meticulous, a little dangerous, built to last. She's drawn to symbolism, the weight of objects, the idea that what you wear can be armor or confession. Cleo keeps her circle small and her workshop smaller, but she's fiercely loyal to the people who earn it. She likes her music loud, her coffee black, and her conversations either dead honest or comfortably quiet.

Beneath the cool exterior and dry humor, Cleo's a closet romantic about craft, memory, and the stories objects carry. She saves every scrap of silver, every dented ring from a flea market, convinced that everything broken has another life in it. She just doesn't talk about it much.