Jewelry Making for Hilary Duff (And The Rest of Us)
by Rebekah Rombom '08
As a young girl, Sonya Frisina ’89 learned Native American beading and
weaving techniques from her great-grandmother on the Colville Confederated
Tribes reservation in northern Washington. There, she made her first
pieces of jewelry.
Today, living farther south in California, Frisina is the successful
purveyor of a jewelry line she operates under her maiden name, Sonya Ooten.
Frisina’s baubles have adorned the necks and earlobes of celebrities like
Cameron Diaz, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Hilary Duff, and have been featured on
television shows including Beverly Hills 90210 and Friends. In November
2005, Frisina opened her first stand-alone shop, Sonya Ooten Gem Bar, in the
Larchmont Village section of Los Angeles. There she sells pieces that
feature her signature crocheted patterns as well as other necklaces and
earrings adorned with pearls and gemstones.
With her name sprinkled across the pages of top fashion magazines and her
jewelry appearing in display cases across the country, it would be almost
impossible to guess that directly following her graduation from Dartmouth,
Frisina followed quite a meandering path to her current career.
As an undergraduate, Frisina majored in history, but also studied art
history and discovered the College’s jewelry studio her sophomore year.
“I do remember it was closed my freshman year, that was when they
refurbished it. I was just waiting, waiting, waiting for it to open, and
then I was just there all the time,” Frisina says. “I just loved it.”
While she originally thought she would go to law school, Frisina’s interest
in art inspired her to move to Santa Fe after graduation, in hopes of finding
work at a gallery. Instead, she studied with a master jeweler there and
then began to work in the costume departments for some major films.
Eventually, she began to make her own jewelry and sell it to retailers.
The major turning point for the Sonya Ooten collection, though, came when
Frisina secured an account from Barneys New York. The high-end department
store, with outposts in New York, Los Angeles, Boston and other major cities,
featured an elegant Sonya Ooten pendant necklace on the cover of one of its
catalogues.
“It makes the difference,” Frisina says of her Barneys account, “because
other retailers go to Barneys to see what Barneys has. It’s just a very
aspirational sort of store. It’s a big deal, but you have to make sure that
you’re ready to produce.”
To keep up with wholesale and retail orders, Frisina employs one other
craftsperson full-time to manufacture the jewelry along with her, and another
to help with crocheting. Frisina knows her craft well, but working with
delicate gold and affixing gemstones to her pieces can be time consuming.
“I can do all that stuff, I just don’t really have time to do it,” she
says. “There’s just so many more aspects to being a jewelry designer if
you’re not an artisan designer, if you’re actually trying to sell in the
marketplace.”
To deal with non-creative details, Frisina counts on her husband, also a
Dartmouth graduate, and other employees who manage shipping and orders.
In her store, Frisina provides customers with a large variety of styles to
choose from, and shoppers can even help create their own ornaments by choosing
specific stones and settings. Since larger retailers only buy a small
percentage of her offerings, Frisina has been looking forward to opening her
own storefront.
“I’d been thinking about it for a while,” she says. “I just wanted to have a
place to put everything that I do.”
Even with all of her successes, Frisina is still learning about the
industry, looking to possibly break into the fine jewelry market and doing all
of her public relations and market research in-house.
“I think I’ve gotten quite a lot of press just doing it on my own,” Frisina
says, citing her experience with an outside public relations firm as a waste of
money. “We’re doing it ourselves; we’re excited about the jewelry, we
know the jewelry, we can send it out quickly.”
While she still sometimes feels the stress of her relatively unpredictable
career in the arts, Frisina enjoys being able to create her own schedule.
“My most favorite part is the freedom, just the time freedom, because I have
two small children,” she says. “That I can do whatever I want to do when
I want to do it and when it’s important.”
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