Image: Cordelia Ring – Juna Fae
With a sustainable collection, three sisters want to shake up the European diamond market.
The Koulouris sisters have always been sensitive to beautiful jewelry. Living all three in Antwerp, in the diamond district, one can say that this is something that is obvious… Except that it isn’t! These stores, which seem to carry secrets “with their armored windows, their doorman and the prohibitive price of the jewels“, has always put them off. “When I got married, I searched for a long time for an engagement ring and a wedding band that would look like me, but I couldn’t find one,” recalls the elder Stefanie Koulouris.
What the young woman was looking for: rings with diamonds but with a bohemian spirit and above all a real beautiful story behind what will symbolize her love. “Sustainability, we see it appearing at full speed in recent years in the field of food, fashion, cosmetics too. But for jewelry, we don’t even think about it. And yet, poor quality costume jewelry is just as disastrous, while the gold and diamond industries are far from virtuous!” she says. And since she can’t find her dream rings anywhere, she designed them and had them made with gold already recycled…
That was years ago. Now married with two small children, she and her two sisters have founded Juna Fae, a small brand of contemporary gold and diamond jewelry.
What they offer: bohemian rings made only of recycled 18-carat gold and diamonds designed in a laboratory. The collection was even made in a CO2-neutral workshop, all made in Benelux. The prices are affordable for luxury jewelry since they start at 350€.
Stéfanie Koulouris dares to say it: finding the right people in Antwerp is very difficult, as the diamond sector is still traditional in its approach: “Many people didn’t want to work with laboratory-created diamonds. One day a workshop told us: yes, this might be the future, but for the moment it is a threat“.
Not for the Koulouris sisters who have the ambition to “seriously revolutionize the traditional diamond industry in Europe“.
From this sinuous and sincere path came a collection of 16 rings named after flowers. Transparent rings all the way through, with a bohemian, vintage beauty.
The rings are thin and elegant, they combine very well with each other, as can be seen on Instagram… “We made them to put love back into jewelry everywhere, so synonymous with love,” concludes Stefanie Koulouris with a smile.
