Found on the Last Day: How I Discovered Maximilianas
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I almost missed it.
It was the fourth and final day of the Milano Fashion & Jewels Show in Milan, Italy. This was my first year attending not as a visitor, but as a buyer for my family's leather goods store in Toronto, Canada. My mother and my father built that business from nothing after immigrating from Brazil, growing it from a small storefront in a high-end shopping area into a 4,000-square-foot store that has now been open for over 37 years, weathering every challenge along the way, including the pandemic that closed so many others like it. For years, I joined my mother on buying trips during my vacation, watching her eye for quality and her instinct for what would resonate with customers.
This particular year was different. I was in the middle of what I now think of as my year of rediscovery. A slow, deliberate return to the parts of myself I had set aside while building a corporate career. On a whim, I added this jewelry trade show to my trip. It ran four days before the leather goods show my mother and I always attended together, and something told me I should be there.
By the fourth day, I had seen a great deal of jewelry. Beautiful and technically impressive. Nothing stopped me. Then, through a crowd gathered around a booth, I saw it: pops of color, organic and sculptural shapes, a kind of modern minimalism that looked nothing like anything else on the floor.
Maximiliana Rodriguez was standing behind the booth with her husband. She only spoke Spanish, so her assistant translated as I asked the only question that mattered to me in that moment: What is this made of?
She told me that Tenerife, Spain (her home) has a centuries-old tradition of ceramic-making, one her own family has carried for generations. When I asked how she learned her craft, she told me she learned by playing with clay in her childhood, the way some children learn soccer by playing ball outside. When demand for the larger ceramic pieces her family was known for began to slow, she made a decision: she would bring that same handcraft into something smaller, something wearable. Something that could travel with a person the way the larger pieces never could.
Every pendant and bead in the Maximilianas collection is still designed and handmade by Maximiliana herself. The chains are made separately, by artisans in Barcelona, and brought together with the ceramic pieces to complete each one.
I didn't know, standing at that booth on the last day of the show, that I would soon make the decision to build IRLÔH. I only knew that something had stopped me. This is the same feeling I now trust completely when curating every piece in the IRLÔH collection. It's not something I can fully explain. It's simply how a piece makes you feel when you first see it. Like a 'coup de foudre' or love at first sight.
Maximilianas was the first collection I brought into IRLÔH, and it remains one of the truest expressions of what Irlôh is built on: pieces with real hands behind them, traditions that span generations, and the quiet confidence of something made slowly, on purpose, by someone who has been doing it her whole life.
Some things are worth finding. I found this one on the last day, almost by accident, and I have never stopped being glad I did.
Discover the Maximilianas collection.