The Materialist : Erin Sachse Nathan

The designer behind ERINESS talks about getting discovered at 18, finding meaning in ladybugs, balancing creativity with commerce, and building a jewelry brand on her own terms.

Erin Sachse Nathan never intended to start a jewelry company.

She had been making things for as long as she could remember—knitting, building a camera out of wood and a drawer, and, beginning in seventh grade, making jewelry by hand. It was simply what she did: a way to work with her hands and create objects that made people happy.

Then, at 18, while working at Fred Segal before starting college, a jewelry buyer noticed one of Erin’s handmade bracelets.

The buyer asked Erin to make one for her and offered a deal: if she received ten compliments while wearing it, she would carry the bracelets at Fred Segal. The next day, she got her ten compliments—and asked Erin for her brand name and wholesale prices.

Erin had neither.

“I was like, ‘What’s wholesale?’” she remembers.

That unexpected encounter became the beginning of ERINESS. Erin spent the money she earned working at Fred Segal on gemstones and began producing wire-wrapped “daisy chains”—delicate hand chains made by wrapping individual beads in wire. Fred Segal became her first retailer. By the time she graduated from college, she was selling through roughly ten stores, filling reorders between exams and occasionally selling jewelry directly off her body to people who stopped her on the street.

There was no grand business plan behind it. The jewelry worked because it was unmistakably hers.

“I think because it was so authentic to who I am and who I was at the time, people really gravitated toward it,” she says.

From a Side Project to a Fine-Jewelry Brand

As graduation approached and Erin’s friends began accepting conventional jobs, she faced a decision: treat the business as a college side project or find out what it could become.