Story
JAL began as a weekend adventure back in 1983, when we went to New York City to perform Creation Story off-Broadway, sponsored by Lily Nova Fashions.
We started by accumulating a large number of beads at several wholesale shops in SoHo and Tribecca.
Within days, we were making good sales of our products ... they were unusual necklace & earring sets made in the style of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Phoenician and Pre-Columbian pieces.
These were designs with which we were quite familiar, because we had served as curators and restoration artists for a number of collections of ancient artifacts, mostly articles of daily use and jewelry from non-burial sites, meaning not from tombs but from homes, palaces and temples.
We soon found that we could re-create almost any ancient style piece with modern parts simply because jewelry has not, essentially, changed much in the past 10,000 years or more.
Many of our vendors/suppliers told us that they knew of people who were good sources of ancient beads. We had already developed a number of very high-end suppliers of ancient beads, but did manage to find acceptable ancient beads from new suppliers, too, many of whom specialized in the Djenne Trade Route, making the beads and resulting products even more accessible and reasonably priced.
Our original bead collection has grown rather immensely since we began collecting beads back in 1972.
Today there are hundreds of sources of ancient beads, many of which are on the internet. There is no shortage of necklaces made in the ancient style these days either.
What makes us different is that we are the original makers of the ancient jewelry, and we've come back into modern rebirths to do them again, just for you.