For me, it has never just been about selling jewellery. It's about helping people celebrate their stories.
My mother grew up in Bunbury. She met my father in Nottingham in the early 1970s — she was working, he was an engineering student from Jordan. They married, moved to Abu Dhabi, and I was born there in the 1980s. When the Gulf War made the region feel less certain, we moved back to Bunbury. She was coming home. My father was starting again.
He couldn't find engineering work, so he opened a small shop selling stamps, coins and banknotes. The shop next door was a jewellery store. The owners were divorcing, and with nothing more than a gut feeling, my father bought it. Overnight, he became a jeweller — with almost no experience, in a small town he'd just arrived in. Over the next thirty-five years, he built that business from a shop he hadn't planned to own into a building he did.
I grew up inside it. After school I'd sit behind the counter and watch suppliers open their cases, watch couples choose rings, watch my father value a piece in his hand. I called it grown-ups playing dress-ups. What I was really watching was people in the most emotional moments of their lives, and how a piece of jewellery held that moment for them long after the day had passed. That's the part I never stopped being interested in.
In my early twenties I left. London, eventually, where I sold watches at Harrods — most successfully to clients from the Middle East. Standing on the other side of that counter, selling to women who knew exactly what they wanted and exactly how they wanted to be spoken to, I learned more about luxury in four years than I had in the twenty before.
I was on my way home to Australia when a two-week stop in Dubai became fourteen years. There was a chance meeting on a flight, a childhood neighbour I hadn't seen since 1991, a job offered almost immediately. I spent those years working with fashion houses across the Gulf, building a brand of my own, and raising three children — and all the while, quietly, collecting the thing I actually loved: stones, and the people who know where to find them.
When Covid turned a family visit to Perth into something permanent, we stayed. My parents and brothers were here. It was time to build something of my own.
NAHIDA is my grandmother's name. She was proud, elegant and warm, and it has always felt like a name with something behind it. The pieces I find and make under it are chosen the way I would choose for myself — bold, wearable, and worth keeping. Each one begins with a conversation.
— Nahida