About

About

African Jewellery Melbourne

African Jewellery Melbourne hand crafts colourful contemporary and gifts. The creative studio target Melbourne’s savvy shoppers seeking innovative and unique timeless jewelry and fashion accessories. 

I specialise in handcrafed gifts which comes with a unique experience. The emphasis is on positive ans community thrives on positive sense of individual and community sense of wellness. More over, the expressions of inclusion, empowerment, and sustainability are blended into the ethos of this creative jewellery designs.

How I started My Handcrafted Jewellery Business

I started the Akoscreative Jewellery brand here in Melbourne in 2017. With a strong creative design background, and deep appreciation for my West African Ghanaian arts and culture, a jewellery shop idea was all too exciting to simply ignore. I love colours, their vibrancy, varied tones, and hues makes me feel happier.

African craft and recycling lifestyle

This is where I rescue, upcycle, and repurpose clean off cuts of fabrics and materials – just the way my Mama taught me. Living sustainably is part of my African culture and upbringing. Nothing made ever goes waste. Apart from the African print fabrics, and Krobo beads which I buy from Ghana, most of the other prints are donated of rescued from opp shops.

Art, craft and design as part of formative training 

Arts, crafts and design came naturally to me from an early age, but formalised my talent through formal education in Ghana. I loved art school in primary and high schools  This is where I formerly learnt about our valued Ghanaian traditional culture, lifestyle, and symbols.

Aside artmaking, Textiles and Graphic Design, Sculpture and Pottery, I was deeply fond of music, dance, and food.

Ghanaian jewellery symbols

Ghanaian jewellery and craft symbols and their meanings became the foundation in my jewellery design. And this is why, crafting by hand, allows me to fully embrace all the beauty and diversity around me. There is so much inspiration to have with African symbols. I often take the liberty to experiment with various symbols to create new meanings in crafted jewellery. This is why, you would find my jewellery designs uniqe  

Wearable art in contemporary Jewellery Design

When we look around us, we see wearable art. The dynamics of creativity results in different forms of art we can wear. For this reason, jewellery making for me never ceases to inpire more forms to serve human purpose. Moreover contemporary fashion ensures a high level of craftsmanship. I simply love to create fashion accessories by hand. To meet customers need, I do listen to feedback.

Akos creative jewellery collection exudes fun, confidence and authenticity. Akos focuses on the ethos of diversity, community, and wellness.

Wearable Art has a place in Healing

Crafting wearable art brings healing to the both the maker and wearer. Let me explain. Making jewellery helped focused my thinking while deepening my desire to explore, learn and grow. Creativity is a process that adds live to otherwise mundane objects we find around our environment.  On the other hand, the wearer places value on the art piece, and from which meaning and connection.

My Health and Wellness approach to handmade jewellery empowers people all around the world to self-love and to feel good about their individuality.

HEALTH AND WELLNESS THROUGH THE ARTS

“My jewellery is a clever combination of Art and Design. It evokes a deep sense of individuality and wellness”.

Finding your Inner Voice through Jewellery Making

Jewellery is a simple but effective platform where you can own your unique voice. For instances, as a Woman of Colour (WoC) it is very important to find this inner voice and presence in this space.

Similarly, I can use this inner voice to express some of other values essential to the world in which we live today. One of these issues are the environment and sustainable living. Hence, with my gift packaging, I am minimal with how much materials I use.

Without compromising on presentation and value of my hand made jewellery, I use packageing which is safe for your jewellery.

For this reason, I use plain brown card stock. Most of the packageing materials had come from factory left overs donated to me.

Most often, I will use clean donated fabrics, offcuts and ends of other materials, where  possible. I beleive printing adds to the carbon print and envionmental pollution. For this reason, I limit the need to print, and only do so when absolutely necessary.

Ways to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint

Did you know how much energy and carbon is released into our environment each year? With every single print run of your business cards, customised gifts wrapping and tags?
Akos Gift Wrapping and Packaging focus on minimal printing and use packaging materials without the unrequired logo prints wherever possible.

Personal touch through handwriten notes 

Jewellery design is about the main craft that allows me to include a personal touch. And here, I do achieve this through personal notes that I include in gift packaging. This is very important to enhance the sustainability message where re purposefd packaging materials are used.

Where I find Environmentally Friendly Materials for Jewellery

In fact, envionmentally-friendly materials used in jewellery making in Melbourne can be found around us. Crafting ethically and responsibly is not a thing for specific niches in fashion. For this reason, I purposely handpick recycled glass beads (Krobo Beads) handpicked from Krobo Ghana. 

Additionally, the African wax print fabrics or Ankara, are aIso handpicked from the Makola Market. I chose to trade with women and I am fair and ethical in all my trade. This is how I support smaller businesses in Ghana. It offers most of these local traders financial freedom. 

This is where I recycle, upcycle, rescue and reuse clean off cuts of fabrics and materials – just the way my Mama taught me. Living sustainably is part of my African culture and upbringing. Nothing made ever goes wasted.

I create from my home studio located in Melbourne’s North, Australia.

Ghanaian Names and Meaning

The meaning behind my name is simple. Akos, is a Ghanaian (Akan tribe) which means, a girl born on Sunday. Akosua, Akosi, Koshie are all variations of Akos but from the different tribes. Vsit back again to read about the Ghanaian Naming System.

Why I started a Jewellery Business

I started a jewellery making business in Australia in response to an inner urge towards more creative freedom. This orientation towards different art forms encouraged resilience and growth in me, learnt to become strong and resilient. It just so happened that discovering new ideas and actually bringing to life these design concepts, energised me to get out of bed each day.

What started as passion soon became a way to earn some income. So, here is how I started crafting jewellery to sustain my own well being.

Actually, it all started with a few Clothing Collection back in 2013. During one of my holidays to Ghana, I fell in love with all those amazing and colourful  African wax prints. So, I purchased different fabrics, sketched clothing designs and worked for days with a local seamstress to bring my fashion illustrattions to live. I managed to sell all those dresses, shirts and tops in Melbourne.

But, I also brought along from Ghana the beautiful fabric offcuts. I could not throw them away because they were too beautiful too discard. Imagine the thousands of fabrics off-cuts which goes to clog our landfill each year. Moreso, I can safe the environment and be sustainable this way. And so, this is how I got inspired to start using those offcuts to create fabric earring collections.

How Melbourne’s Social Enterprises Defined my Jewellery Business.

Akos joined Sisterworks in 2016 using her Akos brand to create colourful, fun and engaging ethical fashion. Space2be in St Kilda also helped with developing new products from since 2018 when I discovered and joined them. Today, I also stock some of my unique jewellery at Queen Victoria Women Centre (QVWC) on Lonsdale Street,Melbourne. 

How I name my jewellery

Now here is how I name my African jewellery and accessories Products. The names are derived from Ga and Ga-Adangbe, people of southern Ghana, names of people and places. So, African jewellery in Melbourne embraces the multi cultural aspects of diverisity in Australia.

Follow me on Social Media

Please follow me on all social media as Akoscreative. INSTAGRAM and FACEBOOK.

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