I never planned on making jewellery. I grew up in Berlin, lived in New York and studied in Amsterdam before moving back home and falling into branding and event production, building things for other people at a pace that eventually wore me out. Making jewelry began as the quiet opposite of that, something slow I could do with my hands that didn't belong to anyone else.

It began with a pendant. While I was visiting New York for work, I spent a few days with someone I had met on a night out. She worked as a salesperson in a jewelry store and before I left she let me choose one. I picked a small astronaut, mostly because it looked like nothing else I had seen. I wore that pendant every day.

People kept asking about it, which almost never happens between strangers in Berlin. After enough of the same conversation in bars and on the street, I decided to make my own version, which took me months because I had no real idea what I was doing. I put it in a small online shop, a friend wrote about it on his blog, and it sold out.

For a few years after that I made a bit of everything without much direction and none of it really went anywhere. Eventually, after one freelance job too many, I bought an old car and drove down to the southwest coast of Portugal with my dog. I have always been good on my own and it tends to be when everything finally goes quiet that things start to move. I spent months down there with almost nothing to do but be there and by the end of it I had more or less decided to leave jewelry behind for good.

When I got back to Berlin, the only real option in front of me was going to work for another agency and the thought of it turned my stomach. So I started thinking about alternatives and eventually landed on giving jewelry another try, except this time starting over with a more open mind than I'd had before. I had always been a perfectionist about it, wanting everything balanced and clean and exactly right but I slowly understood that I would have to let some of that go and give in to the unpredictability and the small surprises that come with sandcasting.

I built a new workbench, spent a long time experimenting until the process finally started to feel like mine and began putting the results out into the world. People responded to them and the thing I had always kept off to the side gradually became my actual work.

All of that is where Casey Fuchs comes from. The pieces are designed in Berlin, in silver and gold, and they carry a lot of what I brought back with me from that Portuguese coast.