Why the name AVALON

Why AVALON

The story behind the name AVALON starts long before JAE Jewelry Co.—more than 40 years ago, on the island of Kauai.

In the late 1980s, I was living on Kauai. My boyfriend, Scott, played in a band that had a regular gig as the house band at Club Jetty, a restaurant and nightclub on Nawiliwili Harbor.

It was one of those periods of life when the people around you become much more than friends. The musicians in that band became part of my extended family, and those relationships have remained part of my life all these years.

One of the musicians was Randy, the saxophone player.

Randy went to a garage sale one day and bought a box filled with miscellaneous cassette tapes. Mixed into that box was a cassette of Roxy Music’s album Avalon.

After Randy listened to it, he handed it to me.

And that was it.

I fell completely in love with Roxy Music.

There was something about their music that I had never heard before. It was big and full. Sexy. Sophisticated. A little mysterious. Interesting enough that you wanted to keep listening because there always seemed to be another layer underneath it.

I played that cassette over and over and over again.

And then I started listening to everything Roxy Music.

I loved the drama and the details—the way their music could create an entire world around a song. Even something like hearing a car start and speed away in “Love Is the Drug” fascinated me.

And, come on, how sexy was Bryan Ferry?

I loved Roxy Music enough that years later I even named a cat Roxy.

But AVALON became something more than the title of an album to me.

At the time, I was preparing to go to design school at FIDM in San Francisco. We were given an assignment to invent a company—to imagine the brand, give it a name and create its identity.

Of course, I called mine AVALON.

I even created a logo with the word AVALON running across the center of a cross.

There was something about the name that stayed with me. I loved the way it sounded. I loved the way it looked. I even loved physically writing the word. There is something about writing Avalon in cursive that has always felt almost meditative to me.

But more than anything, the name became connected to a time and a group of people in my life.

Music does that for me.

A song can immediately bring me back to a house, a person, a summer, a road, a feeling or a particular moment in time. Avalon brings me back to Kauai—to Scott, Randy, that band and the extended family we created around it. It brings me back to music, creativity and possibility, and to a younger version of myself who was just beginning to imagine what she might do with design.

And somehow the name followed me.

Fast-forward more than 40 years.

When I created JAE Jewelry Co. and eventually realized that the men’s jewelry I was designing needed to have its own identity, I didn't spend much time wondering what to call it.

It was always going to be AVALON.

In fact, what eventually became AVALON originally began as a JAE men’s collection called The Roxy, with pieces named as little nods to the music that inspired it.

Looking back, it almost feels as though I named this company decades before I actually created it.

A garage-sale cassette made its way from Randy to me, from Kauai to a design-school project, through more than four decades of my life and eventually back into my work as a designer.

I still have that original cassette tape today.

And I still love the word AVALON every bit as much as I did when I first heard it all those years ago.

For me, AVALON isn't simply the name of a men's jewelry brand.

It's music. It's Kauai. It's friendship and family. It's design. It's memory. It's a younger version of me and the designer I eventually became.

Some names are created for a brand.

AVALON was part of my story long before there was a brand to name.