THE PERSONAL TOUCH
Maya Brenner became one of the lucky few when she managed to turn her past-time into a lucrative business. And it all happened by complete accident. Back in 1998 she was a social worker helping teenagers struggling with substance abuse. “In the evenings I would sit in my New York city apartment making jewellery to calm my nerves,” she says to us on the telephone from her luxurious 1920s-style villa in Los Angeles’ fashionable Silver Lake.
She remembers how people would approach her in the street, asking where her jewellery was from. Before long, she was making pieces for friends, which quickly progressed to fulfilling a couple of modest orders from small boutiques. But it was when a sales rep from Anthropologie discovered her designs and put in an order for 600 necklaces that the business
