The Quality Makers: Becky Hosmer of Anna Beck

Anna Beck celebrates the beauty of connection, working with heritage artisans who practice the art of handmade techniques that have been passed down from generation to generation. Their mission is to thrive in collaboration and connect to cultures through the power of design. With production based out of Bali, Becky believes in building lifelong relationships with her partners as a community-minded, mutually-beneficial-forward space, supporting generations of local artisanship. 

Their jewelry connects you with the artisan who personally made your pieces by hand. Every time you wear an Anna Beck piece, Becky hopes it serves as a thoughtful reminder to give more thanks, connect more meaningfully, love more deeply, and radiate more goodness into the world. Read more about her story below.

How was creativity introduced into your life? Tell me about your journey as an artist. 

I didn’t really know I was creative until my early 20s. But I always had this curiosity and this desire to learn. When I was in college, I spent a semester in Nepal. I ended up doing one internship where I worked at Mother Teresa's orphanage, and another in which I got to work with a silversmith. Looking back now, I think those experiences created this trajectory for my life. No matter what I did after that, I always went back to what I feel my soul's purpose is: to create, connect and be of service to others. 

Many years later, I took a trip to Southeast Asia and eventually went to Bali. I connected with these artisans, and began making pieces for myself, my friends and my family, and eventually got into stores. I lived in San Francisco at the time , and I started doing consignments and street fairs, and then we got picked up by Nordstrom, which was huge for the brand.

What led you to become a designer in the first place?

I was at a point in my life where I was thinking back to my time in Nepal a lot, so I ended up traveling again. My time in Bali was particularly inspiring because the artisans there are known for all their handmade work. It's a very spiritual, artistic place. When I say spiritual, it's that every day pause in which they give thanks for everything that they've been given. 

Living in America, we move at such a fast pace, and I only noticed how much I lived in my head when I was in Bali. There was this shift for me – I would just go into my heart. I didn’t have any formal training and for years I refused to call myself a designer because I was never taught that I was creative.

I had to teach myself I was creative. Lately I feel that I want to create things that are more one of a kind. Sometimes you get lost in the business of it all, but I really just want to go back to intention. If I were to take away that expectation of production, I would go back to creating more specialness.

What have you learned about the importance of heritage in jewelry making?

I would say I have quite a modern approach to jewelry but I also love tradition – this idea of going back to something that’s unattainable in the present, something that’s almost just a feeling. When I travel to these very old civilizations, there's something really seeped into those cultures that's about honoring tradition. They appreciate where they came from, their ancestry, and that gets transferred into everything they do. A lot of these communities, they learn from their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, and there's this total connection with family. I've always been attracted to objects of beauty when I travel, as well as the pace of life in different parts of the world. I like people and places that are different from me, and I think the beauty of living in East LA is there's so many layers of culture. I believe that being surrounded by difference is the only way we’ll grow. I’m so grateful to the Indonesians for teaching me that. To make a piece of jewelry… that takes time. It means the world to me that I was able to witness and be a part of their world. 

You speak about how the practice of honoring is embedded in Balinese culture. How do you continue that through Anna Beck?

Mostly through storytelling. All our jewelry is made in Bali, but I recently visited this other Indonesian island called Sumba. My friend has a resort there and I found it was probably what Bali was like 20 years ago. There was this group of artisans that I met, more specifically this woman who represents a group of textile makers. I got to witness them in their practice and that was so special to me. I'm conscious about not creating too much harm or waste in an environmental sense, so I love that these women work with all natural dyed fabrics and materials.

I also went to Zimbabwe last year to visit my friends who run a nonprofit there. I met this co-op of women that make beaded necklaces, and we ended up doing a collaboration with them. Every piece of jewelry, whether it's in Sumba or in Zimbabwe, has a story. These women might walk an hour a day to work or two hours to fetch their water. But to see a group of women sitting at a table connecting with me – real shy at first and then slowly opening up and welcoming me into their circle, that’s everything. As we grow, it’s really important to me that we employ more women. I want to support a lot of our artisans who come from Java, which is a neighboring island, as they leave their families to come to work. Stories like this give me perspective and remind me to be grateful.

Community plays a big role in your brand. Tell me how you give back to the communities that are at the heart of your production. 

Listen, I always want to do more. If I could give it all to them, I would. I met Robin Lim, founder of Bumi Sehat, when I lived in Indonesia and I could cry talking about her. She's one of the most extraordinary human beings. She's a Filipina-American woman who lives in this Balinese village called Ubud. As a midwife, she saw how many women were dying in childbirth and so she opened up a clinic. We became friends and started this ongoing collaboration where we've been able to donate quite a bit of money. We gave 30% of the necklaces that we created to the clinic  and people really loved that idea. I'm really proud of the work we’ve done together.

Tell me a bit about your collections.

What really drew me to the Balinese handmade jewelry was this dot technique that I came across years ago. It's a dot/circle method, and that’s become our signature. That's what people gravitate towards. They like that they can recognize it's our brand. But like every good designer, I always strive to reinvent the wheel, which for me meant going into stones, so we created this new collection called Rasa. I love this one in particular because it allowed me to be more experimental and I like challenging myself. In a lot of my earlier collections, I was really playing with texture and shapes - those are probably some of my favorites. 

The artisans you work with create the pieces themselves, but do you also collaborate with them in terms of design? 

I'd like to work on that more because we don't want to be stealing their labor, so to speak. I just recently sent them some shapes and gave them the freedom to play around with the designs. What they came back with was not what I had planned, but I loved it and it’s now being added to our next collection. When it comes to collaboration, I practice that very authentically. The efforts are always joint and that’s how I run my company in LA too. I really want to hear everybody's perspective. I believe in leading from the side versus from above. 

What do you hope people will take away from your brand when engaging with it?

I hope people understand where these pieces come from. What we don't realize is that when we buy something for a cheap price, it doesn't actually do all that good for the world. When people aren't being compensated fairly, it really trickles down to their families. We live in this fast-paced culture where we don't understand what we’re acquiring and where it comes from. So I hope that I can share the stories of the women, the men, the families that have made these pieces. 

I’ve noticed that we really seem to attract good people. When I used to do trunk shows, I met teachers and doctors and community organizers and I know there’s a reason for that. I hope to always keep those kinds of people close. We're lucky because a lot of people that invest in Anna Beck, they're collectors for life. Once they're in, they're in. Some people don't know why they're drawn to our pieces, but I believe it was made for them. 

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