I was 27 the first time someone called me an artist.

I laughed. Not because it was a joke, but because it felt like a word that belonged to someone else  someone with a degree from an art school, a studio full of brushes, years of formal training I never had.

I came from engineering. Spreadsheets, logic, structure, problem-solving. The kind of world where things either work or they don't, where there's a right answer and a wrong one. Jewelry making wasn't part of that world. It wasn't part of any plan.

And yet, somehow, it found me.

The thing nobody tells you about taste

Here's what I've learned: an eye for beauty isn't something you're handed at birth, and it isn't something only art schools can teach. It's something you build  quietly, without noticing  every single day of your life.

It's the color of the wall in a café you sat in once, in a city whose name you've half-forgotten. It's the way a pearl catches light differently depending on the hour. It's a piece of jade you held in your hand on a trip and couldn't put down. It's every sunset, every fabric, every strange and beautiful thing you've ever paused to look at twice.

All of that adds up. Decades of it. And eventually, it becomes your way of seeing  completely your own, shaped by no one else's life but yours.

I think that's what aesthetic really is. A window into someone's soul. Not a skill you're certified in, but a record of everything you've noticed.

What engineering actually gave me

I used to think my background was the opposite of art. Now I think it was the foundation.

Engineering taught me how things hold together balance, proportion, how a piece sits on a body, how a clasp should actually work and not just look pretty in a photo. It gave me patience for the slow, careful parts: setting a stone just right, getting a chain to fall the way it should, making something that's beautiful and built to be worn, not just looked at.

So when I started designing, I wasn't starting from zero. I was just pointing all of that precision at something new  at pearls, at jade, at the small objects I'd been quietly collecting in my head for years without realizing they were a collection at all.

Why FindingYoYo exists

I don't say any of this to make my story sound unusual. I say it because I don't think it is unusual  and that's the whole point.

You don't need formal training to have taste. You don't need a degree to notice beauty, or to know, instinctively, when something feels right. You just need to have lived  paid attention to the places you've been, the things you've held onto, the small moments that stayed with you longer than they probably should have.

That's what FindingYoYo is built on. Every piece starts as a memory  a place, a feeling, a thing I saw and couldn't shake. Pearls that remind me of the ocean on a particular grey morning. Jade that carries the quiet of a market I wandered through once. None of it is designed to follow a trend. It's designed the way I see  which is really just the way anyone sees, once they trust what they're looking at.

If you've ever picked something up  a stone, a postcard, a strange little object from a trip and kept it for no practical reason at all, just because it felt like you... you already know what I mean.

You don't have to call yourself an artist for that to be true.

You already are one.

 

 

Cate Wen

Founder of FindingYoYo