Ann Williams can trace the idea for her Yearly Co. jewelry brand back to her mother, Janet Simonson, and the gold bangles jingling on her wrist whenever she stirred a pot in the kitchen or cleaned up around their house in Menlo Park, California. These delicate bracelets were gifts from her paternal grandparents, who long ago began giving each woman in Williams’s family a bangle on their wedding anniversaries, a tradition Williams says they may have picked up while living in Puerto Rico.
For years, her grandparents bought the bangles from various jewelry stores, but while she was pregnant with her second daughter, Williams took a metalworking class at Vanderbilt, her alma mater, and soon began making them herself. In 2016 she officially founded Yearly Co. The Nashville company now offers eleven different sizes for each bangle style, and each can be customized with stones and engravings to mark milestones. (Birthstones and children’s initials are most popular for Mother’s Day.)
“To be able to attach the memory of my mom doing all the things she did in her bangles adds so much meaning to the business,” Williams says. “It’s made us really think about what each woman would want on her wrist when she’s holding her grandchild, or when she’s at her daughter’s wedding.” Williams also likes to imagine that her customers will pass these heirlooms down, the way her family does. “It’s really cool to think that women wear these their whole lives,” she says. “Something that will be passed down one day that you actually had physically on your body through your whole life is just such a sentimental and special thing.”
Cassandra Browner Richardson and Carlene Browner, too, founded their jewelry company, BR Design Co, with their mother in mind. When they were children in rural Southwest Georgia, they watched Queenie Bee Browner craft earrings (along with hand-sewn dresses and matching purses for the girls) and sell her clay creations at markets throughout the state. Before long, the sisters each had a clay jewelry business of their own, selling their wares from a card table next to their mother’s. After going their separate ways after college graduation (Richardson as a nurse, Browner a first-grade teacher), the sisters eventually came back together in Charleston in the late nineties and founded BR Design Co, keeping in mind the many lessons their mother taught them.
“Those lessons that I learned from her, they stick,” Richardson says. “Make a list of what you need to do every day. Mark it off. If you can’t get it all done, then you put that at the top of your list for the next day. It’s just all these things that we watched her do repeatedly, and she was just this little lady in Southwest Georgia sending jewelry all over the world.”
The sisters, who are now in their fifties and live less than five minutes from each other, play to each other’s strengths when making clay jewelry. “Since it was just us two girls, our mother did not allow bickering,” Richardson says. “People always say, ‘How do you work with your sister?’ I’m like, ‘Listen, we’re Queenie’s daughters.’”
Around 2010, the sisters reintroduced one of their mother’s designs, the English Garden print, which they now make and release three times a year. With its raised floral details and bright colors, the design’s revival received Queenie’s stamp of approval. “She would give us little pointers,” Richardson says, “but a few years ago, she said, ‘Oh, yours looks so much better than mine. Yours has come a long way.’ You can’t beat that compliment.”
Aside from clay-sculpting techniques, Queenie also taught them bookkeeping, customer service, and how to work together as sisters and business partners. “We would not be able to do even half of the things that we’ve been able to do if it had not been for her,” Richardson says. “She taught us to be businesswomen. And you cannot put a price on that.”
Read more about Yearly Co., a 2018 Made in the South Award Style runner-up, and BR Design Co, a 2020 Made in the South Award Style runner-up, and enter this year’s awards here.
