Down Memory Lane: The Botanicals
Dear Choo Yilin Community,
If you’ve followed us for a while now, you’d know that botanicals have always featured heavily in the Choo Yilin Universe.
In our earliest days, we made the Camellia, a flower native to Asia, take centre stage in one of our first collections. The Choo Yilin Camellia pieces (c. 2010) became a cornerstone in our work, where it was so beloved that so many of you would buy multiple pieces of the same design in different colours.
We never told its story though, because as a young, tiny bootstrapped brand, we needed more ability and resources to do so.
The same went for two other iconic Choo Yilin botanical collections - the Cherry Blossom (c. 2013) and the Hydrangea (c. 2017).
So, in 2024, we’ve decided to take a trip down memory lane with our founder, Yilin. We’re celebrating the stories of these three botanicals that have been an integral part of the Choo Yilin Universe. We have carried these stories with us for years, and we’re delighted to finally be able to share them with you.
We are far from the first jewellers to work with these timeless flowers and we thought it important to share snippets of how other jewellers, long before us, paid homage to them. That the same flowers that have existed for millions of years have been immortalised as heirlooms across different times and places.
We have especially loved how these 19th and 20th Century European and American jewellers have taken these native Asian flowers and imbued them with their cultural significance, and showcased these flowers in a way that is so distinct and awe-inspiring.
Finally, we take you on a sneak peek of some of Choo Yilin’s Estate Library of botanical antique pieces, where they have been carefully collected over many years and sought inspiration from, and then lovingly reinterpreted and reimagined for the 21st Century.
This trip down memory lane is dedicated to the thousands of women who have one of Choo Yilin’s botanicals. Without you, there would be no story to tell.
