How It Began
A Wish
I am Haruna Mori, founder and designer of ANNA DIAMOND.
ANNA is my sister's name. She is ten years younger.
This was before the brand existed. My sister told me one day that she could find no hope, not in the society ahead of her, and not in her own future.
As she kept talking, it came out in pieces. The news was only ever dark, and it weighed on her. Every time she opened her phone she measured herself against someone else and came out smaller. This was not one person's private trouble. It was the plain voice of a generation living now.
What she said about hope stayed with me for a long time.
may the world be a little more hopeful,
and more alive than it is today.
With that wish held close, I gave the brand her name instead of my own.
Affirmation
Then the design.
At ANNA DIAMOND we never begin with a shape. We begin with something we want to say. One line draws the outline, and the design fills in the color.
Almost always, that line is an affirmation. You are fine as you are. What makes you different is what shines. Changing is not something to grieve. Each collection grows out of a line like that.
So every ANNA DIAMOND piece carries its own words.
and keep your own color and shape.
all the way back to their origin.
We choose materials the same way. If we are going to make something beautiful, we want the story behind it to be beautiful too, something we can hold without hesitation. That is how every material here is chosen.
Read about lab grown diamonds
Read about urban mining
Read about Akoya pearls
Rather than a perfect circle like all the rest,
the character that will not fit the mold
is what looks radiant to me.
This way of thinking spread beyond the jewelry. Once the pearl is taken, the shell has always been discarded as industrial waste. We wash it, dry it, and grind it down. The shell becomes a glaze, and then a bowl. It becomes plaster, and now it is the wall of a gallery in Daikanyama.
A Promise
Of everything we wear, jewelry seems to me the furthest from fashion and the closest to something inward.
Clothes change with the season. A ring given ten years ago can still be worn today, and the years only deepen what it means. Whose company it passed through. Which decisions it was on your hand for. You wear the memory along with it.
That is why I believe a piece of jewelry can become a talisman.
There are days when you measure yourself against someone else and feel smaller. Days when holding to what you decided leaves you unsure. On a day like that, one small light at your hand. It tells you that you are fine as you are. That is what I want to make at ANNA DIAMOND.
meet you where you are
and light the way ahead.
Haruna Mori
Making jewelry alone will not change what the next ten years look like. Beyond my sister, we give real weight to talking with the children who will build that future.
At the Mitaka and Shibuya campuses of Tankyu Gakusha, we held a class called Giving Shape to What You Feel. It begins with grinding Akoya shells by hand. Then, on the theme of who I will be in ten years, each child writes a line about themselves and finishes a painting in colors made from the ground shells.
Something meant for the bin becomes paint. Something about yourself becomes your own words. Those two things were the whole lesson that day.
A portion of the proceeds from pieces set with diamonds goes to Diamond for Peace. For pieces made without diamonds, we give through more trees, enough to plant one tree for every item sold.
Dust gathers, and in time it makes a mountain.
