We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elaina Mansour a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Elaina, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?

What a challenging task to name a business! It is the first piece of branding for your business, one of the most important identifiers. When I was deciding on a name for my jewelry label, I explored all different types of names. It took weeks. I eventually sat down and dwelled upon the reason why I was starting a jewelry label with my own designs. I knew I needed a name that encapsulated the essence of my vision and mission. Jewelry is so much more than personal adornment, it often holds sentimental value and deep personal meaning. As a child, growing up in a Lebanese household, I was captivated by the exquisite jewelry my mother adorned daily, regardless of the occasion. She instilled that elegance is an everyday celebration. Not just reserved for special occasions, elegance, beauty and joy are everyday celebrations. Jewelry is one such way to celebrate the everyday. The connection of jewelry, heritage and childhood memories served as the ultimate inspiration for my own creations. With this personal connection, I knew then I wanted a name that represented my Middle Eastern heritage and that was also personal to myself as the designer. I played around with many combinations and finally decided on ‘Nijma M’. The word ‘Nijma’ is my given middle name and means ‘star’ in Arabic and the ‘M’ is the initial of my last name.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Before I launched Nijma M Fine Jewelry, I was a practicing naturopathic doctor. I still proudly hold my medical license and naturopathic medicine will always hold significant importance to me. I realized though, that after a few yers of practice, that I had an overwhelming creative energy that wasn’t getting an outlet in my medical practice. Contemplating a career switch after spending close to a decade becoming a naturopathic doctor was a difficult pill to swallow. After much introspection, I decided it was time for a career change and that I was going to launch a design label with my own designs. As mentioned, my heritage, childhood memories and passion for jewelry served as ultimate inspiration and the driving factor to launch my own label.

Nijma M creates fine solid gold jewelry. Sustainable practices are part of the Nijma M DNA, and to honor our commitment to the environment, we exclusively use recycled gold (currently 14K and soon 18K) in our creations, as well as responsibly mined natural diamonds. All designs are meticulously handmade my experienced bench jewelers in NYC and Montreal. We offer our clients special designs that embody the duality of timeless sophistication and ritzy coolness in every piece of fine jewelry we create. No one fits in a box (how boring!) and this concept of duality is where magic happens. We like to call this magic ‘modern opulence’.

We aim for our designs not only to narrate our story but to weave seamlessly into the individual stories of our cherished clients. Beyond being mere adornments, our designs are crafted to become vessels of personal tales, heirlooms in the making and embodying the essence of modern opulence for the everyday.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

I’m a classic type A personality that likes to see results ASAP – and I have certainly had to unlearn this, it’s a process. As much as this comes from a place of high achievement and a dedicated work ethic, it doesn’t always translate to reality and the business world. I won’t beat around the bush – the jewelry industry is a difficult one in many ways. From branding, designs, wholesale, marketing and PR strategies, building client relationships and trust, etc. – all of it. Trying to position your brand as a luxury one takes time. It doesn’t happen quickly. It takes patience, perseverance and a lot of pivoting along the way.

Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?

I design all designs for Nijma M and work with skilled bench jewelers to hand make all designs. Finding a manufacturing partner was not easy. I started working with a team in NYC for my initial collection. I value collaboration and they were a fantastic team. Since I am located in Toronto, Canada, the shipping of commercial goods across borders became timely and added to costs. It was difficult to truly anticipate the additional costs without experiencing it. I had to hire a border customs agent and pay certain duties/taxes on the jewelry entering Canada. In addition, like many jewelry manufacturers, a MOQ (minimum order quantity) for each style was required. As a new designer and brand, this was a huge lesson. Having to order a certain quantity of inventory certainly tied up resources that could have been allocated to other things like marketing and PR (which are crucial for any new brand because if you have a good quality product but no one knows about it, there is no point). Searching for a Canadian manufacturing team to eliminate these additional costs, one that works with recycled materials and didn’t have a MOQ took weeks and going down many Google rabbit holes. I was able to find a renowned team with exceptional experience and beautiful craftsmanship to bring my design to life. Working with this team allowed for the shift in our business model which further supported our commitment to the environment. Each unique design is now handmade for each customer order.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.nijmamfinejewelry.com
• Instagram: @nijmamfinejewelry
• Facebook: facebook.com/nijmamfinejewelry
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nijmamfinejewelry/

Image Credits
August Media, Maya Sherwood (photographer)