Meet the maker: Ocean & Stone Jewelry

The tumbler starts at six in the morning in a Waimānalo carport, and for the next four hours it sounds like surf in a coffee can. Inside are eleven basalt pebbles Kaʻiulani Mahoe carried up from a cove she will name only by the highway mile marker. By ten they come out matte and even, and she sorts them into a tray by weight. Nine will become pendants. Two go back in the bucket for next month.

Mahoe spent nine years on the bench at a Chinatown jeweler, sizing rings and setting other people's stones, before she started Ocean & Stone out of the carport in 2020. The first year she sold at two markets and a friend's salon. She still keeps the shop apron she wore in Chinatown hanging by the door, mostly, she says, so she remembers how long the apprenticeship actually was.

stone first, then silver

The order matters. Most jewelers design a setting and then find a stone to fit it. Mahoe starts with the stone, traces it, and carves the bezel in wax around a shape that already exists. It is slower, and it means no two pieces match. A pendant takes about a week from tumbler to clasp and sells between one hundred eighty and four hundred twenty dollars depending on the silver. She finishes roughly forty pieces a month and sells nearly all of them by hand.

The silver is reclaimed, mostly dental and industrial scrap bought through a refiner in Kalihi, cast by a caster she has used since her Chinatown years. Chains are the one part she does not make. She tried, hated the result, and now buys them from a supplier in Portland with a note on every order asking for the heavier gauge.

You can find her at Catalyst pop-ups a few times a season, usually on a table shared with Kai + Kukui, whose shell work she calls the reason she started paying attention to material in the first place. The two studios trade offcuts. Silver scrap goes one way, koa ends come back, and both of them describe the arrangement as older than either business.

There is a waitlist now, about six weeks in the slow season and longer before Christmas. Repairs are free, permanently, on anything she has made, which costs her a Sunday a month and buys her customers for life. Two mainland boutiques have offered wholesale terms and she has turned both down. The stones, she points out, only come from one beach.