Long before Noémie had a name, it had a habit. I grew up in a coastal town, where the ocean was less a view than a rhythm; something you woke up to, walked beside, and measured your days by. As a child, I was the kind who couldn't leave a beach empty-handed. My pockets were always full of shells: whole ones, broken ones, ones that caught my eye for no reason I could explain at the time. I kept them in jars on windowsills, in boxes under my bed, tucked into corners of drawers; a whole quiet archive of days I didn't want to let go of.
I didn't have a word for it then, but what I was really doing was trying to hold onto something. A good afternoon. A particular light on the water. A memory that felt too good to just let become the past. Collecting was my way of saying: this mattered, and I want to keep it.
In 2020, I found a way to actually do that. Resin gave me something collecting never could - permanence. For the first time, I could take something small and fleeting, a shell, a petal, and set it exactly as it was, in something clear and lasting, instead of watching it fade or crumble the way keepsakes usually do. What started as an experiment on a kitchen table quickly became something I couldn't stop doing. I wasn't just preserving objects anymore. I was preserving moments.
Flowers found their way in soon after, and when they did, it felt less like a new idea and more like a memory of my own. In my culture, women have always been adorned in flowers - woven into our hair for celebrations, worn in moments of both joy and grief, carried not as an accessory but as a language of their own. Flowers marked things. They said something without a word being spoken. I grew up watching the women around me wear that tradition, and I wanted to carry a piece of it forward - not pressed flat in a book, not wilting in a vase, but set in resin: wearable, and lasting.
That's the process behind every piece I make today. Nothing starts in a factory or a catalog; it starts with something collected: a shell from an actual walk, a flower from an actual bouquet or garden, sometimes even sent to me by someone hoping to preserve a memory of their own. Each one is set and cured by hand, poured slowly, finished carefully, so that what comes out the other side isn't just jewelry. It's a small, wearable act of preservation.
Noémie exists because I believe the things that hold our memories deserve to last as long as the memories themselves. A shell from the beach where you grew up. A flower from a day you don't want to forget. These things are worth keeping - not in a drawer, but with you, every day.
Thank you for letting a piece of your story become part of mine.
~ Benita, founder