On Day 4 we found ourselves visiting one of our favorite suppliers, Heng Mei, hoping to find a handful of metallic freshwater strands. The main obstacle when looking for metallics is sifting through the 1000's of AA-AAA strands, hoping you find those few special ones. After 3 days of staring at pearls under ultra-bright lights, your eyes start playing tricks on you. In the end we were able to walk away with a few strands, but not nearly as many as I would have liked.
Now I'll admit, I'm new to the "ripple" game, but these strands totally knocked our socks off. After sorting through a few hundred pounds of pearls, I found a couple of hanks with strong color, intense orient and true metallic luster. Even though the owner kept telling me, "no good, customer want round only", I decided to help him out and take these off his hands. I thought the natural color Akoya's were "THE" find of the show, but they've got some serious competition in these ripples. I'll warn you, these pearls are seriously photogenic, so we've posted a lot of pics.
With the metallic strands and ripples purchased and sent home via courier, we decided to call the trip a success. As a thank you to Alana for taking such great pics, we headed off to Bali, Indonesia for some R & R - in fact I'm writing this post poolside ;) .
I want to thank everybody following along, its been a lot of fun to share the process with the pearl community. Stay tuned for a full recap next week and of course more details on when we'll start releasing product to the public.
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