Calcutta, Chicago, and a decade of workshops in between.

I grew up in a Marwari family in Calcutta, where jewelry was woven into everyday life. It came out for weddings, Diwali, engagements, and the small milestones in between. In our community, a piece was rarely just a piece. It was a record. Of an occasion, a promise, a generation. I grew up around women who could tell you who gave which necklace to whom, and when, and why. That was my first education in what this work actually is.

In 2008, I moved to the United States when my husband took a job here, and we eventually settled in Chicago. The first time I went looking for a pair of real kundan studs, the kind that would have been unremarkable back home, I couldn't find them. Not the way I wanted. Authentic pieces moved quietly through closed social networks. Everything else was labelled "Indian-inspired" and made in a factory no one could trace. For a woman who wanted something real, bought in daylight, with a name and a provenance attached to it, there was no middle ground.

So I started looking for it myself. On trips back to India, I went to jewelry expos, followed up on names friends had given me, and met vendors one at a time. My first dedicated buying trip was three weeks long, with an empty suitcase and a list of workshop addresses I wasn't sure were still current. Honestly, I didn't know what I was doing. I was learning by asking. Same questions at a dozen different workshops, paying attention to which answers matched. I came home with 48 pieces and a spreadsheet of friends who wanted them. Everything sold in six weeks. That's when I knew.

Ten years later, Studio 3311 works with a small, handpicked group of trusted workshops across India. Family-run artisans, most of them we've known for years, some making jewelry for four and five generations. The list didn't grow in a hurry. Each workshop came to it slowly, after multiple visits, after we had watched the work, checked it against the invoice, and sat with the family long enough to know whose word held.

It wasn't straightforward. A young Indian woman asking about weights, purity, and provenance wasn't the customer these rooms expected. More than once I was told, kindly but firmly, that this would be hard to build from outside India. I travelled with a jeweler's loupe, a scale, and a notebook of questions I wasn't willing to let go unanswered. Some trips were disappointing. Some workshops promised things they couldn't deliver. I learned to tell the difference, usually a trip or two too late.

Relationship by relationship, I built a small book of people I trust enough to put my own name on. People I pay on time, pay fairly, and visit when I can. They are the heart of Studio 3311. Every so often, a customer will send me a photograph of herself in a piece we chose together, on a day that mattered to her. I've started to collect those. On the long trips, they're what I look at.

Today, I still visit every year. I still choose every piece. The supplies come home to Chicago, and on most weekends you'll find me at the kitchen table with my family, unpacking what's come in, cataloguing it, and packing the orders going out. Studio 3311 is not the biggest Indian jewelry store on the internet, and it was never meant to be. It's the one I wish I'd found when I was looking. A place where a real person has held every piece, where the materials are listed honestly, and where, if you email, an actual person (me) writes back.

Jewelry isn't just decoration. It carries something: a memory, an occasion, the mark of a person. The more you know about what's in your hands, the more it means. Thank you for being here.

Namrata