Holly Yashi started in 1981 with two people in a garage in Arcata, California. Forty-five years later there are around fifty of us, in a 15,000 square foot studio, in the same town.
That last part is the part people find surprising.
Two people and a garage
Holly Hosterman was making hand-cut animal earrings out of brass and silver. They were good, and within months they had a following, which is a rare thing to say about a first product.
Paul Lubitz joined her, and the two of them went looking for something that would let the work do something nobody else was doing.
The grey metal
They found niobium.
On the shelf it is unremarkable, a dull grey. Run electricity through it in a bath of water and it turns colors that no dye or plating can match, because the color is not added to the metal. It is the metal, changed.
What made it a business rather than a curiosity was working out how to control it. Every color is one dip, and the shade depends on the exact charge. Get the process right and you can repeat a color precisely, years apart, across a whole collection. Get it wrong and you have a very expensive grey earring.
That process has been the signature of Holly Yashi since 1981.
Why still Arcata
Arcata is a small town on the far north coast of California, several hours from anywhere that would normally be described as a business center. It would have been easy, at several points across forty-five years, to move production somewhere cheaper or to hand it to somebody else.
The reason it never happened is that the work does not survive the trip. Every piece is dipped by hand in small batches. Someone has to watch the color come up. That knowledge lives in the hands of people who have been doing it for years, in a building where they can walk over and ask each other a question.
Handmade is a word that gets used loosely. Here it describes a physical constraint on where the company can be.
What that means for a piece of jewelry
It means the color will not fade, chip, peel or tarnish, because there is nothing on the surface to come off.
It means the pieces are light enough to wear all day, because niobium is a light metal and color adds no weight.
And it means that when a color is discontinued and brought back, it comes back correctly, because the process is written down in voltages rather than remembered as a recipe.
Forty-five years
The anniversary is worth saying out loud, because in this industry most of what looks handmade is not, and most of what is handmade does not last four and a half decades.
Two people in a garage in 1981. Fifty people in Arcata in 2026. Same town, same metal, same process, done by hand.
Come and see it. The studio is open, and there is a guided tour.
