Last month, actors Isabelle Huppert and Viola Davis excitedly walked away from the Golden Globes gifting suite with leather belts and handbags crafted by Santa Barbara designer Amy DiGregorio.
Amy grew up in Boston and studied art at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Adventure brought her to Santa Barbara, but when she arrived, she didn’t know what she wanted to do. “I was shy about telling people that I wanted to be an artist,” she says. “I wanted to do something creative and something with my hands. I had in mind that I was going to make a living with stuff I made, but I never thought it was going to be jewelry.” In the meantime, she took a job in internet sales.
In 2001 she went to Costa Rica, where she noticed handmade jewelry made out of seeds. She returned to Santa Barbara, quit her job, and “booked a ten-week trip to Southeast Asia — no rhyme or reason.” She traveled to Indonesia and wound up in Bali. “I found myself on the floor with a salesperson with millions of stones going through all the stuff she had,” recalls Amy, who then went to Thailand, where she found “big, beautiful, and faceted stones” like lapis and amethyst. “I got home and started to learn about metals,” she says, set on becoming a jeweler.