Alisa Thorp
Mercurius Jewelry
Oakland, California
Alisa Thorp co-founded Mercurius Jewelry with her husband, goldsmith David Thorp in 2007. She holds a BS in environmental science from Columbia University but followed her heart to study and teach yoga for more than a decade before taking over the operations at Mercurius. Currently, she is studying gemology at the Gemological Institute of America and specializes in responsibly sourcing materials for Mercurius collections and custom projects.
What does responsible design mean to you?
For me, it means being governed by which materials will be used, rather than starting from an aesthetic or style point. There are some things that you’re not going to be able to use because you can’t incorporate them responsibly.
When we pivoted from doing a lot of custom designs to putting out our own collections, one of the motivators was that we were getting requests for all kinds of stuff, and we weren’t comfortable with all the materials we had to source. For example, a prospective client wanted a pendant and earrings with a matched set of heated tanzanite. After I ran through everyone on my usual list of dealers and had to make phone calls to an ever-increasing circle, I realized that though I could buy these stones, I would have to work with someone totally unknown to me who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) provide any information about how many hands that stone passed through and the mining or manufacturing conditions. During this time, I also did research into the specific conditions of tanzanite mining. After all the work we’d been doing to build better knowledge about the sourcing of our materials, we decided we’d rather turn down the job than look the other way and order from a source we didn’t trust or feel comfortable with. There’s a freedom to being able to say no to certain things. It felt freeing to be able to draw that line.
How do you incorporate responsibility into your jewelry-making practices?
One component is sourcing. We’re trying to make sure that we find sources that are both the least harmful possible and the most beneficial. For example, we can use post-consumer recycled diamonds, which cuts down on harm to the environment, but they’re not beneficial [to the economy and living standards of the mining communities]. We’re always looking for new programs where we can buy from small-scale miners or offer some benefits to mining communities. So much of the wealth in the industry is on the retail side of things. We want to tip the scales back so there’s more equity in the supply chain, and more of that wealth is going back to where the materials come from.