The Materialist : A Podcast from At Present

Marc Bridge and Monica Stephenson, Anza Gems Worldwide Headquarters, Seattle, WA Monica Stephenson is the kind of guest who makes you see a familiar object—one you might already love—like it’s brand new. In this episode of The Materialist, we sit together in her Seattle office overlooking Lake Union and the skyline, and we follow a thread that runs from the jewelry counter in a Midwest college town all the way to artisanal gem mines in East Africa—and then back again, into the hands of the designers and collectors who ultimately give these stones a second life. What unfolds is not just Monica’s career story (though it’s a fantastic one), but a bigger argument about what jewelry can do when it’s treated as both beauty and infrastructure: an object that sparks desire on the surface, and—if you care to go deeper—a vehicle for livelihoods, dignity, and long-term economic power. A retailer’s education: why the “floor” matters Monica’s origin story is refreshingly unromantic in the best way: she starts in retail in the early 1990s, selling jewelry while studying art history and fine art at the University of Iowa. That experience, she argues, isn’t a detour—it’s the foundation. Retail trains you to listen, to understand what customers actually respond to, and to translate a piece of jewelry into a reason someone chooses to bring it into their life. It’s also where she first feels the pull of what she calls the “small sculpture” quality of jewelry—the idea that a piece can be materially precious, artistically rigorous, and emotionally immediate all at once. She remembers being captivated by the intention and artistry of emerging designers, a shift away from mass-manufactured sameness toward jewelry with a point of view. You flip a bracelet over, she says, and it’s as beautiful on the underside as it is on the top—craft as moral clarity. There’s a personal echo too: Monica didn’t grow up in a jewelry family in the classic sense, but her father worked outside sales for a New York designer and would have merchandise spread across the kitchen table. So the objects were always there—close enough to normalize, just far enough away to remain slightly magical. And then she says something that is both funny and true: we’re all magpies on some level. We like the shiny things. But for Monica, the “bug” goes deeper than sparkle. It’s the entire ecosystem—materials, workmanship, makers, and the people who carry the knowledge. It’s a love affair with process. Tech, jewelry, and the limits of a “flat detail page” From the jewelry counter, Monica’s path bends into the early internet. In the late 1990s she buys the domain for a diamond referral concept and builds what amounts to a matchmaking site connecting consumers to local retailers. It’s an early clue of what becomes a recurring theme in her work: jewelry is relational. It moves through networks of trust, story, and access. That blend of jewelry fluency and tech curiosity leads to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Amazon asks her to help launch its jewelry store in 2003. Monica becomes, in her words, “the tech translator to the jewelry industry,” straddling two worlds and learning to speak both languages. What’s especially interesting is her reflection on why Amazon’s vision didn’t fully match the reality. Jewelry can translate to digital—today we have video, richer storytelling, and much better tools for dimensionality and nuance—but at the time, the attempt was to fit a complicated, largely non-branded category into a UPC-driven system. Watches could behave like that. Diamonds and gemstones couldn’t, at least not cleanly. Even within diamonds, there’s real variance from stone to stone, and the effort to “shoehorn” that complexity into a flat product page was harder than it looked. When I ask what she wished the platform could have been, her answer is basically a thesis for modern jewelry commerce: more immersive visuals, more dimensional truth, and more designer storytelling—who made it, why they made it, what the process is, and what’s embedded inside the object beyond its specs. The implication is clear: if you remove story, you remove meaning—and jewelry is meaning-driven. I Dazzle: the closet years and the power of deep storytelling After Amazon, Monica steps back for family life, has two daughters, and then—like a lot of high-functioning creatives—hits the point where being “only” a parent isn’t enough for her brain. She needs a creative outlet that isn’t organized around snack time. That’s where I Dazzle returns, this time as a blog. She subscribes to the industry magazines again, starts writing, and—nudged by her husband—channels her ideas into WordPress. What follows is the kind of grassroots editorial work that, in hindsight, feels inevitable: she travels to studios, interviews designers, attends trade shows, reports on trends, and asks the kinds of thoughtful questions that draw people out. One of the most charming moments in the conversation is when the late Cindy Edelstein recognizes Monica across a trade show floor: “You’re I Dazzle,” and tells her she’s required reading. Monica, who has been writing essentially “in a closet” assuming she has seven readers, is suddenly confronted with the reality that she’s built a real audience—and that the industry is listening. Why did it strike a chord? Monica thinks it’s because she was doing something that wasn’t common yet: making the designer and the studio legible. You could see the finished piece, but you couldn’t always access the depth behind it, even in a retail environment. Her blog became a window into the people and the process. It served trade readers and everyday consumers alike, and it sometimes even acted as a matchmaker—connecting retailers to designers, and designers to specific gemstones Monica spotlighted (Tucson DM requests included). It’s also notable how she describes the work: “purely editorial,” not monetized, and financially punishing in the way many truly editorial things are. But she loved it. It was immersive. And it prepared her—without her knowing it—for what came next. The trip that changes everything: “from the dirt to the finger” The hinge point in Monica’s story comes almost by accident: she sees a tweet about a documentary traveling to East Africa to film the journey of a gemstone “from the dirt to the finger.” The premise hits her like lightning. She DMs the organizer. They ask if she wants to come—as the resident blogger, “documenting the documentary.” She does her due diligence, then makes the kind of leap that feels irrational until it becomes destiny: she flies 9,000 miles to the edge of a mine with a group of strangers, having never been to Africa, never been to a source community, never even visited a Montana sapphire mine. It’s the first time she’s seeing the beginning of the supply chain that she’s spent her entire life engaging only at the end. What she finds is not what the average consumer imagines when they hear “mining.” In East Africa, much of the gemstone mining she witnesses is artisanal and small-scale—surface and alluvial work rather than industrial excavation. This isn’t a corporate capital-markets machine with helicopters and sonar. It’s shovels, picks, hand labor, remote terrain, and extreme uncertainty. Miners might work for weeks or months with nothing to show for it. The labor-to-reward ratio is brutal. And yet Monica doesn’t describe it with pity. She describes it with respect: passionate people doing backbreaking work, often as a rational alternative to farming in regions with few options. Many are, in a sense, entrepreneurs—independently funded, operating with minimal infrastructure and limited access to tools, geology, or market knowledge. This is where the episode becomes quietly radical: it reframes the romance of gemstones. The “magic” we associate with a finished stone is real, but the cost of that magic is usually invisible. “We can fix this.” The naïve thought that becomes a real company Monica returns to Seattle buzzing with adrenaline and ideas. She writes obsessively. Somewhere in that writing, a napkin business plan emerges. Her first thought is naïve in the way all ambitious plans start: the problem is just access—education, opportunity, resources, market connection. If she can connect the dots, then the system can become fairer. By the end of 2014, she has a fully formed model. She names it Anza—Swahili for “begin”—because the whole thing feels slightly insane and totally outside the boundaries of what she’s “qualified” to do. And so she begins. She goes back to East Africa, buys gems at a regional gem market, visits mines, starts building relationships with brokers and dealers, learns export realities, and gradually develops a process. There’s an acknowledgment of the “wild west” element—she’s an unusual buyer in these contexts, a visible outsider, someone not many people have encountered at the market tables. She makes mistakes. Some are costly. But she keeps showing up, keeps buying, keeps investing. Over time, the spectacle becomes credibility. What’s striking is how she describes her approach to cutting: she often gives cutters carte blanche with the rough, allowing them to “work their magic.” That creative trust—miner to cutter to designer—becomes part of Anza’s identity. The brand is known for unusual cutting, and designers are drawn to it because it feels like the stone has lived a full creative life before it ever reaches a jeweler’s bench. And Monica learns the business in the only way you truly can: trial by fire, with live capital, sometimes sweating in the bush. Even valuation isn’t purely rational. Color can be emotional. Sometimes the stone that “should” be most valuable isn’t; sometimes the af