When Ronni Simon gets dressed, she doesn’t wear much jewelry – usually just her watch and maybe some hoop earrings, plus the rings she wears all the time because she can’t get them off her fingers anymore. “I’ve never really been into jewelry,” she confesses.

Which is why no one is more surprised than Ronni herself at the overnight success of the jewelry-
making business she started just over half a year ago.

It all began when she was visiting some friends who were making bead necklaces with their children. Ronni, whose background includes pottery, knitting, crocheting, and hand-coloring black-and-white photographs, considers her expertise to be in color and design. Watching her friends bead, she was drawn to the color combinations.

The next thing she knew, she was in a craft store looking through pictures, when she came across one of a knitted cuff bracelet. What, she thought, if she were to crochet a bracelet of wire and beads? The idea appealed to her because it seemed different from what other jewelers on the Island were doing. She reasoned that the more distinctive it was, the more likely it would be to find a market.

“So I bought some cheap glass beads and some craft wire and started playing around,” she says. After making a few cuffs, she tried putting beads on thread with a chain stitch, which led to the creation of what she calls her lariat necklaces – long ropes of beads that can be looped and tied around the neck in several ways. Soon, she was designing other styles – chokers, pendant necklaces, earrings.

Eventually she abandoned the low-end wire and beads in favor of gold and silver wire and semi-precious stones with exotic names such as butter jade, fancy jasper, sky quartz, and flower turquoise. She developed decorative closures that became the focal points of her pieces, so that bracelets might be worn with the clasp on top, or necklaces with the closure in front. Being a person with a small neck and wrists who recognizes that not everyone is as slight as she is, Ronni also created mechanisms for lengthening or shortening her pieces – three bead buttons in a row, for example – so that pieces can be fastened at varying lengths.

Every piece that Ronni creates is unique, yet they are all instantly recognizable as hers. For one thing, she says, “All my things are asymmetrical. I don’t like things to be too perfect.

“The biggest reaction I’ve gotten from everyone,” she adds, “is that they’ve never seen anything like this.

I definitely have a style – funky, but elegant. People recognize my pieces on other people.”

Ronni’s work is currently on display at the Belushi Pisano Gallery in Vineyard Haven, where, at Thanksgiving, there will be a show of her work and that of two other Island jewelers. Ronni likes having her work in a gallery, because she considers it “wearable art.” She also sells privately from her home, and in the coming months, she will be doing trunk shows in cities across the country. “This is a good way to do it,” she says, “because you really have to try it on. When you put it on, it has a life of its own.”

One place she won’t be doing a trunk show is at Bloomingdale’s, although she was asked. “This is how they try you out,” she says, “but I was dissuaded because they mark things up by 150 percent, and I was afraid that maybe people wouldn’t buy at that price.” Ordinarily, her pieces sell for
between $100 and $800.

For the time being, Ronni is working to perfect her designs. Though she decided not to sell at Bloomingdale’s, her goal is to get into a few of the higher-end stores around the country, selling one-of-a-kind pieces. Once she becomes known in the industry, she hopes to be picked up by a lower-end distributor who will take her designs and manufacture them more broadly, for distribution in chain stores. Then, it will be “Ronni Simon for so-and-so designs.”

But meanwhile, Ronni is working away on one piece at a time. “I don’t feel any pride or ego attached to this,” she says. “I’m completely self-trained; I don’t know anything about the jewelry business. I’m just amazed that it’s taken off this way so quickly.”

At a recent trunk show on the Island, someone remarked that everything Ronni makes looks fabulous on her. “Well, of course,” she replied. “That’s because I made it.”