Sacrifice of The Triumph
An interview with Skydog Jewelry on being a 3rd generation jeweler and betting on hard work and heart
Below is a portion of an interview I conducted with Jordan Dzierwa, of SkyDog Jewelry, during a shoot that I, Cassandra Wages, and Sarah Edwards produced and executed to help him build his brand.
For the full interview, or more of my interviews with people that have quit their jobs to pursue their dreams, take a trip to peterprato.com
To see more of or purchase Jordan’s work, visit SkyDog Jewelry.
JORDAN DZIERWA ISN’T your typical jeweler. He doesn’t deal in diamonds. He isn’t trying to fill a store with glass cases and security cameras. He doesn’t even wear jewelry. But he’s passionate about restarting a family business that spanned much of the 20th century on his own terms and in his own time, focusing on his passions and the values his parents instilled in him over the years.
Who are you and what do you do?
My name is Jordan Dzierwa. It’s Polish. I was born in Mission Viejo. I’m from Laguna Hills, California. Currently reside in Orange California, Old Town Orange and my company name is Skydog Jewelry. I was born in 1987.
What were your earliest influences?
My entire family has always had this creative side, always been driven by creativity and art. I played classical violin for ten years. I was afforded a lot of great opportunities because of that. I actually had a full-ride scholarship to the most expensive private school in Orange County based on academia as well as violin and music, so it was orchestra. So I did that for a long time, and just sort of faded. It wasn’t really where my heart was. It was more my parents sort of giving us these gifts that would open these doors for us. So if you play the violin well then you go to the private school for free, right, because they don’t have any money.
So that’s where everything sort of started, with music, with violin, with singing. Also with art. There was always some sort of creativity going on.
It sounds like your parents made your education, and your artistic education, a priority. It wasn’t just academics, it was the arts as well.
Definitely. Especially my mom. My dad’s sort of this quiet, Scorpio-man, but my mom’s like this go-getter. She’s like 5'1". She’s this go-getter. She’ll go to Ralph’s and by the time we leave she’s met three people and she’ll tell me half their life story and I’m like, mom, we came in here for carrots. So she’s that kind of person. Anywhere she goes she meets somebody. People [are] just drawn to her. And they still are. She’s just this amazing little woman.
It’s a nice way of thinking about the people that are responsible for getting you to where you are. I’d like to hear a little about the jewelry itself. Where is it right now?
Right now is just this intense transitional period. I’ve quit my job and have no income, right. I’ve cashed out most of my resources monetarily. So the jewelry is at this point where I’ve become fairly confident in my skills. I’ve had interest in what I’m producing. Now it’s, like, I don’t know how to say it… it’s almost like it’s game time. I need to build my brand, turn a profit… it’s like do or die right now. A lot of people, they don’t understand what I’m doing. I don’t know if that’s because I haven’t communicated that to them or if it’s because they themselves have never applied themselves so fully to one single thing they’ve been passionate about.
Maybe this is your opportunity to communicate it. What are you doing?
What I have been doing is building a brand and building these jewelry pieces.
Let’s talk about the day-to-day. Get specific. What are the things that you’re actually doing each day to make this business work?
Alright, so let’s talk about an average day. I’ll get up around seven. Make some coffee and I go out back. We have a little main house and then we have a back house, kind of a studio on the lot. So I go there and I sit at my bench and I’ll make jewelry until twelve o’clock. So for five hours I’m sitting at this bench grinding, polishing, cutting, shaping, making jewelry. Rings, bracelets, you name it.
I don’t think a lot of people know what it takes to make jewelry. Get a little bit more specific.
The amount of raw materials that transition and transform into that ring, that process is amazing. Tou’ve got a sheet of metal that becomes the bottom that the stones sit on, and you have what’s called the bezel, which is a piece of metal that you shape around each stone, so you solder or weld that metal onto the plate, put whatever other trinkets like rope, twist rope, silver balls, all on there. The stones are the very last thing. Then you’ve got to make the band. So the band’s out of just wire, like a piece of wire you’d put in a wall. This silver wire, you’re welding it together, shaping it, soldering it onto that plate, and it’s all in a very small level. It’s hard to describe.
That’s why I ask. You can say you’re making jewelry, but not everyone is going to understand what it’s like. Where do you get your materials from?
It’s the easiest thing ever to get a wholesale license. Downtown L.A. is where I get most of my stuff now. You’re not paying tax and it’s a lot cheaper and everyone tends to be really nice and supportive.
So you got us through noon of an average day. Then what?
So it’s 12:00 and I realize I’ve run out of 12-guage half round wire, which I need for the shanks, which are the bands on the rings. So I hop in the car and I drive. By the time I park it’s about an hour. You walk through the crowds to one of the stores downtown. You go to the counter, they cut the wire for you, you leave, you pay your $12 parking. You drive another hour back. Altogether you’re close to three hours, just because I needed some wire. I’m back at the house at 3:00. Grab a bite to eat, if I remember to eat. And it’s back to the bench.
That’s a nice segue. How did you learn how to make jewelry?
I was going to community college, this was probably… five years ago. I walked into this antique store and they had a little Native American case. I’ve always been drawn to Native American jewelry, or anything Native American, for some reason. So I go up to this case, and there’s this spoon ring, and I don’t even really wear jewelry, but there’s this spoon ring, and I was like, that spoon ring is so beautiful, and I looked at it and it was thirty-six dollars, and at the time I was working a full-time job at ’s making like ten dollars an hour, and I was paying for myself to go to community college, which isn’t expensive, but when you’re a student, you know.
So I couldn’t afford this thirty-six dollars. I was like, “Man, I can’t drop thirty-six dollars on this spoon ring, it’s just too much.” I… remembered that in my garage for years my father had these sterling monogrammed forks… and I was like, I have an idea. So I go home and I grab a ring mandrel and I grab those forks, right, and I get my dad’s wire cutters, and I’m in the garage and it’s cluttered, and I cut a piece, and I just start hitting it with this rubber mallet around this ring mandrel, and it turns into this ring, and I’m like, “Oh my god.”
Why were these tools in the garage?
Right. So at this point, my dad, currently, is 79, so at that point is maybe 74. My dad is working for the county for about, I don’t know, maybe twenty years as a social worker. But prior to that he was a jeweler since the 60's, I want to say. So in the 60s he started making jewelry. Do you want to talk about this story now, about him?
Yes.
My father. Odd story. Born in St. Louis, Missouri. Worked odd jobs on and off through his thirties. Somewhere in there, I think when he was 17, he was drafted into the military, did a stint in Germany, which he wasn’t happy about. When he came back and worked odd jobs and in his thirties he went to the gemology institute and got a degree in gemology and became a jeweler. And in 1970 he got a loan from his brother, opened a shop in L.A., did jewelry for a long time. In the 90's the jewelry institute took a shit and he went bankrupt. So in his sixties he went back and got his bachelor’s in psychology.
[Here Jordan erupts into laughter. It’s obvious to us both how incredible this all sounds.]
I remember this… my dad… he’s in his sixties, he’s got three little kids, and a wife, and he goes back to school. This is probably the early 90's. Becomes a social worker. He’s been a social worker for a long time now. Those tools, most of his tools, and the bench, sat in the garage for like twenty-five years.
So you come home and you decide you’re going to bang out this ring?
I know they’re there, yeah. I’m just like, I need that ring. I can’t buy it. I’m not going to steal it.
What was that moment like? Did you talk to your dad?
No, not at all. I just bust in. I think he was at work and my mom was home. I went into the garage and I was like, I got this. It just came to me. It just happened.
Describe that moment.
That was like a mild version of man discovering fire. I don’t need that thirty-six dollar steel spoon ring. I just got a free sterling hunk of very thick forks. Come to find out two years later that they were worth a lot of money. They were these vintage Gorham 1902 forks that I’m just chopping up and [giving] away to girls as gifts.
So you realize you don’t just want to make yourself a ring. What happens next?
Spoon rings go on for a couple of years. I’ve always known a lot of women. I’m just giving them away. A gift, or a birthday present. A sterling ring, that I made. One of those girls still wears it today, like, five years later.
What’s that like?
It makes me proud. That’s how it started, with people supporting me, like, “I love your spoon ring.” At some point last year I noticed that there was a lot of people… I’m a huge fan of Instagram… there were a lot of people making jewelry, like metal-smithing is the new hot thing. And I was like, shit, I can do that. And I had all those tools in my dad’s garage. So I just started studying online. Watching Youtube videos, reading all these blogs on how to solder. Ordered a bunch of shit on my Amex and it all came in the mail and this time I consulted pops. I was like, “Dad, I’m going to try to make this ring, this turquoise ring.” Payed like forty dollars for some turquoise stone. And my dad was like, “alright.” So we got out there and he was showing me how to solder and all of a sudden it was like this father-son bonding moment. I was like, “first ring!” It turned out alright.
How did your dad become interested in gemology?
So, my father became a jeweler because of his father. His father was a career jeweler. He never went bankrupt. That was it for him. He had eleven kids and my dad was one of them. He was from St. Louis as well. My great grandparents were from Warsaw, Poland. Came through Austria to the United States. My great grandfather was an architect. Had some work but he had a mental break-down in his forties or fifties because he couldn’t speak English and couldn’t get much work after a while so he was committed to some sort of institution. My dad described it, he said it’s up on a hill. Then he and his wife both die of ruptured appendices at age 56. So bam, they’re gone, and there’s my grandfather, my father’s father, starts making jewelry in the 20's. He’s young. He’s fourteen. He gets offered this apprenticeship with Normal Rockwell and he turns it down because he wants to make jewelry. So, that’s it. For seventy years my grandfather made jewelry in their basement in St. Louis in just this little brick house that they had forever.
What else were you doing during that time you were making spoon rings?
For the last eight years I’ve been in school part-time for a degree in what turned into marketing. I’ve just sort of wandered through this whole higher education system. School part-time, paying for that myself. For the past three years I was working at a hospital and with the little bonus system they had it was probably like eighteen bucks and hour, which for hourly is decent. The job was making me miserable. When you’re dealing with people that are dying every single day, that are dying or have cancer… if that’s not your passion… that’s wearing. After a while I would get anxiety going to work because I didn’t want to be there. It was making me so unhappy. It was just too much.
I had been trying to sell this motorcycle that I had for three or four years. This ‘71 Triumph Rigid that was like, my… you know, you get off work and you go for a ride, because that makes you happier. When I finally sold it to someone that deserved the bike I thought, man, I’ve got four grand here, maybe one or two grand in the bank, I’m going for it. I happened to be failing one of my classes at school and the gentleman who taught it said you can make up all your work but you have to do it by Friday. It was Tuesday. So I called my boss and I was like, “I’m quitting,” and she said, “What? No two weeks notice?” I said, “I know you’ll understand.” And she said, “Alright.” She was super understanding. I knew she’d understand.
I sold my bike. That was such a big sacrifice. It was so tough. I was telling him, “Dude, it leaks oil from the heads, everything’s wrong,” and he was like, “I know, I know.” I might as well have told him it was a piece a shit and he was like, “Yeah, I know, it’s fine.” So I sold the bike, big sacrifice. In return, I was able to quit my job, pass my classes.
I sold my bike. This ‘71 Triumph Rigid that was like, my… you know, you get off work and you go for a ride, because that makes you happier. That was such a big sacrifice. It was so tough. In return, I was able to quit my job, pass my classes.
So you made up the work?
I’m graduating in May. I have two classes right now. I’ve been going for eight years!
I want to throw this in for context. Grandfather’s a lifetime jeweler, never struck it rich or anything like that. Had eleven kids. My dad and his brother both did a lot of jewelry, never very successful. My dad goes bankrupt in the 90s. Before he started making jewelry, [my parents] met in Los Angeles, and they had a life savings of fifty grand, and his brother lent him fifty grand, so they’ve got a hundred grand, and my mom wants to buy a house, and my dad wants to follow his dream of being a jeweler. And my mom’s way of thinking is that she never wants my dad down the road to be like, well, you wouldn’t let me be a jeweler. She doesn’t want anything to be held against her. So they go for it. And they have a shop downtown and a shop in Lake Forest, separately, not at the same time. And he ends up going bankrupt. They lose pretty much all of their money. We were on food stamps when we were young. So now I’m getting into jewelry and imagine what my mom is thinking when she looks at her son that went to college and he wants to [make] jewelry.
Have you talked to her about it?
I don’t know if they know how serious I am about it. I’m hesitant to do that. They know that I’m making jewelry. But I don’t know that they realize the extent to which I’m committing myself.
How do you feel about yourself now that you’ve quit that job, passed that class, and giving everything to jewelry? I’m not suggesting that it’s not stressful…
The thing about the stress is that stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when you’re stressing about something that means nothing and that’s leading nowhere, that’s when the stress is undue. It’s entirely unnecessary. You’re stressing about some job you go to just so you can pay the bills? That’s an issue. So now I’m stressing about whether my passion and my company is going to be a success, and I’m entirely okay with that. The stress is still there, it’s just repurposed.
It’s almost like you’re worried because your mom is worried about you. Why are you deciding to put everything into it?
I feel like a lot of the decisions that get made, especially when you’re a little younger, are with someone or something else in mind. You go to college because your parents want you to, or for some people, you go to college because your parents are paying for it. I finally reached a point where I had to make a decision entirely for myself, which may seem selfish, and I think that’s a good thing. So that’s what that decision was, to jump in the boat of it’s all or nothing.
Sounds like you’re very clear about your commitment.
It’s funny how things sort of tend to come together or fall into place at exactly the right time. I’d been trying to sell that motorcycle on Craigslist for about a year. Some odd people you meet on Craigslist. And I’m at the point where I’m walking to my job going, “Something’s gotta happen,” tugging at my tie thinking, “Something’s gotta happen, something’s gonna happen.” I don’t mean in a bad way. I’m a crazy optimist. I always know that things tend to happen at the right time. I’m never left face down in the dirt. it always happens. You’re like, “I’ve got six dollars in my account,” and you go to do laundry, and there’s a hundred bucks in your pocket. The day is always saved. I’m a huge optimist. The time was right.
I think there’s a real conversation happening about social media. You and I wouldn’t be here talking without it. Who are your influences, the people that you really appreciate?
It begins with my parents. The morals and values that they instill[ed]. Obviously the jewelry that began with my father and his father. The Native American thing began with my mother but with the whole motorcycle culture and rock and roll culture, there’s a lot of that hand-made Native American jewelry that goes around. My jewelry’s influenced by that. I just think it’s beautiful and I enjoy the Native American vibe. And there’s a lot of other brands… like Bandit Brand and Heyoka Leather, and all those cool girls from L.A. and Texas. When we talked about the photos that we wanted to get and the genuine feel of it, they’re a major part of that inspiration. They’re living it and they’re also selling it, too. That’s why it sells well and it looks so genuine, because it is genuine.
You mentioned people you were giving rings to as gifts and that still wear them. That’s probably been encouraging.
Definitely. They’re both good friends of mine. One of them is the sister of my roommate. That’s how I met my roommate. And her cousin. They’ve both always supported me. There are a lot of good people in my life. My roommate included who lets me live at his house and I pay him a little bit of rent. Gives me a studio space in the back. Most of it’s his. He’s got anvils and a forge area and I’ve got a little bench in the back, and I’m so grateful. He’s another one of the reasons that I’m able to do what I’m doing. If you’re positive and you’re a nice person you will attract the same sort of people to you.
I have all the same fears you do. Someone once said to me that karma is the combination of the decisions that I make and the things that I do in my life and the decisions that everyone else is making. You were making your decisions, I was making my decisions, and it brought us here. That’s encouraging to me. It gives me the hope I feel I need to move forward.
I feel the same way. There’s been a few nights lately, late at night, when I’ve been at the bench for hours and my back and feet are killing me and I sit down on the couch and I think, “I’m fucking up.” You’re so tired, and your mind’s not in the best place, and you wonder, what if this is not right?
I have the same feelings. Don’t give up!
I’m not!
Good read?
This interview belongs to a series in the collection The Dreamers. The first story was published today. Click the green “Follow” button below to stay updated.
Left your day job to pursue your dream? Know someone that should be profiled? For more information on how we can work together to capture the essence of your brand or to set up an interview, contact Peter Prato at peterprato.com.
Thanks!
