Jewelry for Everybody's Story.
Hi there, I'm Cathy and my husband and business partner is Vivien (and yes we know its usually a girls name!). We live in the beautiful wine and tourist region of Cape Town, South Africa. I was born with Cystic Fibrosis - an inherited lung disease. By my reckoning I hoped to live to 44 years of age - I somehow settled on that number as my 'expiry date'. So naturally we wanted to make the most of our time together. However, shortly after getting married Viv was diagnosed with a rare brain tumour. We managed to weather that incredible shock and after surgery and radiation we emphatically decided that we would give up the rat-race and spend as much time together as we both had left. As a result we founded our first and much loved jewelry business- we opened a shop and a manufacturing workshop, designed the jewellery collections, sold 1000's of our own designs to tourists around the world (including Richard Branson). But in 2016 we finally decided to call it a day and sold everything. Realistically I was very ill and didn't have much longer to live. However quite unexpectedly and miraculously I received a bilateral lung transplant at the age of 43 years of age, so you can imagine our overwhelming gratitude and appreciation for the extra time we've been given. After absorbing the magnitude of this miracle (only approx. 12 people receive lung transplants per year in South Africa), we immediately started channeling our passion for jewelry into designing collections that express the sentiments that 'Everybody has a story'! And TUESDAY Jewelry was born. We are all defined by the life events that have formed our values and influenced (are influencing) us to become the people we are. TUESDAY jewelry seeks to acknowledge our significant life events, our celebrations and our tragedies, our scars, our victories, our joys. However big or small they may be. Viv and I are both passionate lovers of nature, flowers and the beauty that surrounds us, and we really appreciate the extra time we have to enjoy it. We seek to translate that beauty into something lasting, beautiful, endearing and encouraging. I hope we have a 'memory marker' for you, to help cherish and treasure the moments that define us all. And if we don't, please ask us to design something special to reflect your story!
We recently traveled to Chicago to visit my long time friend (see Chief Cheerleader) and were so excited to open a business and officially introduce Tuesday Jewelry to the United States.
Thank you so much for reading this and we hope you love our jewelry and that you might share your own story with us.
With love from Cape Town and Chicago,
Cathy and Viv
P.S. Why Tuesday
Because it can be just another day, and you have other plans for it. And in the middle of a busy life, on a Tuesday, you have lists to work through and things to do and deadlines to meet and places to go and people to see and phonecalls to make. Then unexpectedly, in the middle of it all, at 2:25pm, there’s that phonecall that you get - that thing that happens - that makes all of it evaporate into insignificance and changes you forever. Good or bad, for worse or for better, devastating or life saving, something happens that redefines everything about you. The life you were in the thick of is immediately, dramatically and forever changed. A reminder that tomorrow is promised to no-one and sometimes granted to some who thought it would never come. For us it was a phonecall on a Tuesday afternoon to say lungs had become available for a double transplant to replace the lungs that wouldn’t last another year. Leave immediately, we operate tomorrow morning. This is the jewellery that celebrates the joy and commemorates the tragic that comes on any day at any time. That last day of your life as you knew it.
Tuesday.
