Jewelry has always been a singular passion of mine. I made my very first piece of jewelry—a gift for my seventh grade teacher, whom I had a massive crush on—at 13. In college, I studied business, but had a girlfriend who was struggling in her metalworking class, so I offered to take over her project—a teapot—and she got an A.  

After graduating, I took an entry-level job in finance for six weeks before realizing that jewelry and metalworking were my true passion, and in 1987, I began working as a bench jeweler until, four years later, I opened my own shop. 

In 1993, I visited Providence, Rhode Island, the birthplace of America’s jewelry industry. I was interested in exploring some of Providence’s historic Jewelry District, and drove my (somewhat reluctant) family up the coast on a field trip to a dealer in jewelry-manufacturing machinery.

While rummaging in this warehouse, I noticed workers dumping boxes of parts into a truck to be sold for scrap. As they worked, a box broke open and some of the pieces spilled on the ground. While I didn’t have a true understanding of what I was looking at, I knew it contained important jewelry designs in the form of deep-relief engravings in tool steel. From this serendipitous opportunity, I ended up with a few hundred mini Michelangelos.

What started as a few hundred has grown into more than 7,000 hubs, dies, and rolls from which we design and build the jewelry collections of HUGO KOHL. My discovery also led to gathering the tools, machinery, and workstations needed to process these designs.

Eventually, I became a board member of the Providence Jewelry Museum and founded The Museum of American Jewelry Design & Manufacturing. In 2024, I presented “Reviving the Industrial Age: Manufacturing Art, Design and Technology of the mid-1920s to mid-1930s Filigree Jewelry of Providence, Rhode Island” at the Santa Fe Symposium.