Our Story

56 years ago, Shashi was a travel enthusiast and antique obsessed desk agent for Eastern Airlines. While on vacation in South America he fell in love with some pre-columbian jewelry. He brought the pieces home, set aside his favorites to start a collection and sold the rest at a small markup.

Two trips later he decided to focus on it full time. Thus was The Museum of Jewelry most humbly born.

1969: Laurel Inc.

Laurel Inc. represents Laurel Burch's first commercial line. In 1969 Laurel and Shashi partnered to produce plated-brass earrings from antique french molds. A few years later Laurel visited Shashi's workshop in China, and started crafting enamel designs.

Laurel's stylized handling of animals, insects, floral, Egyptian revival and lunar themes helped define the line.

1981: Facets Inc.

In the 1980s Shashi developed a thirst for gemstone encrusted jewelry. He traveled the world to source stones and played with a new and radical concept - fine jewelry at a fashion jewelry price point. Thus Facets was born.

Signatures of the line include use of hand-carved natural gemstones, hand-crafted settings which often make use of old work techniques (such as filigree accents, granulation and openwork) and gold-vermeil.

1989: The Museum of Jewelry

While the aforementioned companies were wholesale entities, focused on business to business sales, Museum of Jewelry developed as our retail brand. From 1989 - 2001 we published and shipped millions upon millions of copies of our award winning catalog. Our jewelry graced movie-stars in titles such as The Mask, Indecent Proposal and The Fast and the Furious.

Present Day

As happens with fashion, our styles waned. Around the year 2005 we stopped sending out retail catalogs and scaled back operations. And as happens with fashion (especially with fashions that have endured for thousands of years) the styles came back.

In recent years we've expanded our line to include vintage Thousand Flowers Jewelry pieces, Cingano silver and BoneNE Artifacts. We are diligently working to get the thousands of designs in our warehouse online.

And Beyond...

We humbly invite you to share the journey with us this time by subscribing to our email newsletter - The MuseLetter. Or by following us on Instagram, Facebook and/or Twitter. Or by bookmarking our homepage and checking in on our new products and blog posts from time to time. We're most grateful for your support and patronage, whether it started this year or in 1964.