Interview | Sam Ham of Sam Ham Design
Sam Ham Design is a unisex fine jewellery line founded by Sam Ham in 2017 that reappropriates what is masculine and feminine and plays with humour to inspire power and confidence.
Story Magazine got to interview Sam about her work, inspirations and more. Please continue reading for the feature.
1. Hi Sam, I hope you are well. For the sake of our readers could you please tell us a bit about you?
I am a jewellery designer. I am Irish. I studied before I got here. I studied contemporary art jewellery and then I moved into luxury goods. I studied a Masters in luxury product design. From then I moved to London and then I worked for a menswear brand designing men’s accessories. I did that for two years. In 2017 I bit the bullet and I set up my own business called Sam Ham Design and I design fine jewellery. I started working mainly in silver and then I did three collections in silver and then I designed a wedding collection and now I’m about to launch my fifth collection if you count the wedding collection.
2. I’ve read that your jewellery brand is all about self confidence and power. Could you tell us the backstory to this and how your brand came to be?
Self confidence is what brought me into jewellery. Being a teenage adolescent girl who was 6ft big I really felt that I stuck out like a sore thumb. When you are a teenager you want to be just like your friends and I didn’t fit in. My medium was jewellery because it didn’t matter what size you were it always fit and it was my way of expressing myself in the same way people use fashion. I found jewellery was something very powerful and it made me feel polished and more self confident. All I wanted to be was a jeweller and what I loved was gold; it’s value, it’s history, it’s malleability, how easy it is to work with, how it holds it’s value, how you can change it to and what you can then do with that material, the symbolism and the sentimentality that goes into it. I started making jewellery that was a conversation piece, wanted people to have a double take on it and question whether it was what they thought it was. When I started this in 2017 it was just before the ‘Me Too’ movement and I always thought it would be easier to be male, not that this is an original thought but I always thought that one needed ‘balls’ and I thought If that’s the case I’ll just make my own and we will push forward. So that was where the confidence element came from.
3. What is self confidence to you and why does it matter? Why does it matter to you to instil it into your jewellery?
Without confidence moving through the world is so much more difficult. It is so much harder. Basically you second guess everything you do. Jewellery can help start up a conversation. Like a piece could say that I’m quirky or something else. Jewellery starts conversation and this helps with confidence.
4. Tell us about your favourite collection to date.
I think my favourite collection by me is my wedding collection because it is a study and I hadn’t really thought about the wedding industry before I was thinking of getting married. The wedding collection I started it at the point of looking at diamonds, yellow gold and platinum and the history of why people wear wedding jewellery and how that has changed and how people used to wear an engagement ring to say they were off the market. That is not something I want to be doing in 2021. To some, an engagement ring is an expensive piece of jewellery. It is about commitment, longevity, something that will be on your hand for the whole of your life and then the wedding band which is about unity and you both wear one and are paired together that is a beautiful simple concept as well. The wedding collection looked at how some people want a big rock, other people want something small and understated. We also looked at the universal concept of wearing an an engagement ring. I wanted my husband to wear one if I was going to wear one. My husband is an incredibly conservative guy so he’s never going to wear an engagement ring and that was the challenge so for him in the collection I designed the signet ring which is split between an engagement and a wedding ring. It is the classic shape with one half in platinum and the other half in gold. On the platinum side there is a very small diamond that slots into the wedding band. I know he’s wearing an engagement ring, no one else does that’s ok because it’s private and it comes together to make a signet ring which is a very traditional piece of jewellery.
That is where the collection started and every other ring is based around the different ways in which people wear engagement jewellery. It has some very big pieces and some very small pieces. Some pieces are taking what’s masculine and making it feminine and other pieces that are very unisex. As a collection that would be my favourite.
5. What makes good jewellery and which celebrities wear jewellery in a memorable way in your opinion?
If you want to talk about jewellery and the iconic, we have to talk about Elizabeth Taylor. Celebrity plus jewellery at this time is mostly about who can you put your product on who is going to mostly talk to your consumer? And that’s very tricky. At the moment the power of celebrity is that they can make you and they can also break you.
6. Where can you see your brand going? What are your goals for it?
I see my brand in the long term remaining small. I realise that a part of the business that I enjoy the most is interacting with people and making bespoke work. I work in London with amazing setters, amazing polishers and amazing crafts people. I see it remaining quite small. I work with a bunch of different freelancers but I don’t see myself expanding. The side of jewellery that I like is the emotional sentimental side of it and when people are buying a piece it is for a lifetime. It is bigger than a car, it is something that is definitive of them and I like to be part of the story like that. A really positive part of wedding jewellery is entering somebodies life at a certain point and then you are on their hand for the rest of their life. I see it remaining small, intimate, bespoke, making one collection per year.
7. What and who is currently inspiring you? How does this inform your work?
At the moment I’m getting a lot of inspiration from comedians because I feel they are having a renaissance . I think female comedians are strong and we see more and more stuff being written by women. Phoebe Waller- Bridge the author who wrote ‘Fleabag’ and she has done a bunch of Television series and she’s just an incredible writer so I look to a lot of female comedians and what they are doing and how women’s stories are being told now which up to five years ago people were not interested. So I feel Sharon Horgan who wrote Catastrophe of Channel 4 is inspirational. So women telling stories is what I find really inspirational. Also women in their forties. That longevity inspires me.
8. What would you like for readers to know about the Sam Ham line? What makes you different from the rest?
I have a masculine energy. I try to feminise the masculine. I keep my designs minimal. In my collections I like to work in two scales. I make bold in your face pieces and also teeny tiny pieces that you have to look twice at. People can chose whether they want to be very overt or out there. I try and inject humour into something and turn something that is traditionally masculine into something that is feminine.
9. If our readers bought just one design from you what would recommend they choose?
They should buy my upcoming pinky piggy signet ring. When I moved to London and noticed all these men wearing blank signet rings on their pinky fingers and this kind of aspirational royal British thing that harkens back to some heritage. The pinky piggy signet ring is a play on that. It is solid gold and I designed it in the £300 price point which I know is expensive but for a gold ring it is not.
10. The Sam Ham Design line is synonymous with?
A contradiction.
Thank you to Sam Ham for this interview. Please visit her website for more on her jewellery here.