Pam Meyer

In the fall of 1978, Missouri-born designer Pam Meyer, founder and president of Alchemy, arrived in New York City with fifteen dollars in her pocket and a fortune in terms of ambition. A trained metalsmith without the funds to set up a precious metals workshop, she turned her creativity to producing a junior trend jewelry collection featuring folded semi-rigid vinyl (reminiscent of origami), brooches of collaged materials, and heat-formed neon-colored plastic tubing.

Finding herself repeatedly copied by mass market importers, by the mid-1980’s she switched to better costume jewelry and reorganized her company as ALCHEMY. One of the first designers to make extensive use of patinated and burnished metals, Ms. Meyer also worked widely at this time with a variety of materials such as enamel, wood, paper, shell and linoleum, creating ethnic, almost talismanic looks inspired by North African, and Middle Eastern folk art.

In the early 1990’s she moved to a cleaner, more tailored look inspired by architectural motifs, art deco and Scandinavian design. Disillusioned with the fashion industry’s orientation toward trends, which she considers hopelessly detrimental to genuine originality, she had made the hard but heartfelt decision to return to her roots, to allow nothing but her deepest creative instincts and her primary artistic influences to direct her designs.

Then in the mid 1990’s, while continuing to market her jewelry collection, she introduced a variety of gift items such as boxes, picture frames, napkin rings, and bookmarks. The new product line received a very favorable response from Alchemy’s existing client base and also began to attract a whole new audience for her work in the form of galleries, museum stores and gift stores. It was with this new client base that Ms Meyer found her true niche in the marketplace.

Her philosophy concerning her jewelry is that it should help to project an image of simplicity, and strength in the urban environment. Items to be used in the home (our safety zone), on the otherhand, should, she feels, lend themselves to more varied and sensuous shapes and materials. The look that now defines Pam Meyer and Alchemy is uncompromisingly modern, profoundly sculptural, and intentionally tran-seasonal, always striving for the originality within the confines of practicality, meshing a passion for the artisanal with a penchant for the affordable.