For Jeweler, It’s a Gem of a Career
Kirk Milette is a jeweler with dirt under his fingernails.
When not waiting on customers in his diminutive Laguna Beach shop, he’s in the back-room workshop, soldering, putting in settings, carving and assembling his art nouveau-inspired pieces. It’s about four footsteps from workbench to display case.
Milette does not sell Rolex watches. He considers himself an artisan, creating and selling his work much in the tradition of the many artisans and artists who populate Laguna Beach.
He began making jewelry at age 16, encouraged by a crafts teacher at Laguna Beach High School.
“I’ve always drawn and sketched a lot, and I used to carve and whittle a bit,” said Milette, 40, who lives in Laguna Beach, close enough to his Pacific Coast Highway shop to ride his bike to work.
“Jewelry-making just seemed intriguing. When I build in wax to make an original piece of jewelry, I get to bring my drawing and carving skills together into a small sculpture.”
His late father, Ken Milette, was an industrial designer, drafting designs for everything from furniture to luggage locks for American Tourister. His mother, Susie Milette, owned the Bead Shop in Laguna Beach for 25 years, until 1995. After high school, Kirk Milette learned his craft from several local jewelers, selling his work at the city’s former Winter Festival arts and crafts fair.
“I kept after it, even though during the first three or four years, I probably only made a few dollars an hour, by the time I reinvested in tools and materials. Fortunately, I started when I was fairly young, so I didn’t have a huge financial need.”
Eight years after he opened his Laguna Beach store, Milette came up with a novel idea that brought him both fame and aggravation. It was a kind of musical globe he copyrighted in 1990 and called the Harmonic World, patterned after Chinese meditation balls, manufactured in various sizes.
“It was right after Earth Day, and I had seen one of those chime balls and I thought, ‘Wow! This would be wonderful to come up with a unifying symbol of the Earth with the music inside.’ We went national with it. Nordstrom, Natural Wonders and other large chain stores picked it up and it became one of their best-selling jewelry items in that price category. It was like having a tiger by the tail.
“So many stores wanted it, people in New York were knocking us off. San Francisco had knockoffs. We were trying to get people to produce them as quick as possible. All of a sudden, we went from a few stores to a few hundred stores. It was a hot item.”
Soon, Milette found himself consumed by the task of defending his copyright against competitors.
“What I found out was I am not Nike, and I’m not Jordache, and I’m not going to be able to stop the big boys. I could irritate them, but I could not stop them. They were able to change the product 10% and get around the copyright.”
The fad died down, and national distribution of the Harmonic World stopped in 1995. He still makes them, but most of his work is with natural crystals and gemstones. Milette also specializes in the rare abalone pearl, an item not subject to much competition. Only one in 10,000 abalones produces pearls, and only about one in a million bears a larger, gem-quality pearl, he said. They come primarily from the West Coast, between Seattle and Baja, where abalone beds are rapidly disappearing.
“Tiffany & Co. was very interested in producing these pearls in the 1890s, but they had no success in cultivating them. Abalones are hemophiliacs and will bleed to death if you cut into them, so you can’t open them up and insert something. You’re left with only the natural process.”
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Milette looks to the natural surroundings of Laguna and its coastline for inspiration, sketching designs and then carving a wax model, made into a plaster mold through the lost-wax process. The art of his craft, Milette says, lies in going beyond the ornamental aspect of jewelry, creating something of lasting symbolic value, such as a wedding ring.
“Just recently, a gentleman bought a diamond wedding ring that we designed together for his fiancee. It was very important to him that we create this ring that was going to represent her essence. We worked in these organic lines, like a little seedling, popping up through the earth, just unfolding.
“It was a very delicate design, but it also had this kind of growing strength that he described in her. He wanted me to get a sense of who she is into the ring. And the design also represented how he hoped their relationship would grow.
“A wedding ring is a very emotional item and probably one of the more rewarding things to create. He knew she was going to wear this ring for the rest of her life, so it was very dear to him. It’s a very sacred thing to be involved with.”
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Profile: Kirk Milette
Age: 40
Hometown: Pasadena
Residence: Laguna Beach
Family: Two teenage children
Education: Graduated from Laguna Beach High School; six years’ apprentice work with Laguna Beach jeweler Felipe Mendoza
Background: Began making jewelry at age 16 and selling his work at age 19 in Laguna Beach; developed a wholesale jewelry business traveling through the Western U.S., 1979-82; opened his own Laguna Beach store in 1982; copyrighted and produced the Harmonic World, a chiming globe sold in Nordstrom and other retail chain stores, 1990-95; is a recognized authority on the rare abalone pearl, featured in Modern Jeweler and Lapidary Journal magazine articles
On a jeweler’s patience: “Imagine you want to get this tiny piece of pencil lead into a tiny holder, but this lead keeps going the wrong way. So you have to sit there for an hour with your tweezers and try and get this pencil lead in the exact right place. That’s how some gemstones are. Some gemstones just fight you all the way.”
Source: Kirk Milette; Researched by RUSS LOAR / For The Times