Mama’s Brocade Pochette: A Gift of Craft
An heirloom-inspired keepsake, gifted with every 18KT gold purchase during The Influencers Before Us Digital Trunk Show.
There is an antique-looking box that plays a central role in our film, The Influencers Before Us. At first glance, it is simply a jewellery box, but like many things in our world, it is also a vessel for memory, heritage, and the work of many hands.
Its exterior was wrapped in aged chartreuse velvet, the kind that looked as though it had lived through more than a century of stories. Open the lid, and you would find a lining of raspberry pink velvet, worn and softened with time, set against a sumptuous brocade of jade green and rose. Together, the colours sang in deliberate contrast, bold and unapologetically rich.
The making of the pochette
We did not stumble upon this piece fully formed. It was created with painstaking care: stripping down an existing jewellery box, hunting obsessively for the right velvet with just the right patina, and scouring for brocade that carried the depth and spirit we sought. Then came the assembling — a joyful, experimental and almost meditative act of putting it all together by hand.
The colours were chosen with intent. They recalled the vivid colour-blocked world of the Peranakan shophouses along Koon Seng Road — a UNESCO heritage neighbourhood where our founder Yilin’s family has lived for five generations. Those facades, painted in bold shades of jade, chartreuse, pink, and turquoise, are not simply decorative. They are emblems of a community unafraid of joy, unafraid of richness, unafraid of declaring its presence in the world.
Our box needed to carry that same spirit. And beyond colour, texture was everything. It had to feel like an heirloom, something that could have borne witness on a grandmother’s dressing table to many many milestones, holding decades of stories, waiting to be opened by the next pair of hands.
We loved the box so deeply that we wanted to share it with our community. Gifting the box itself was not possible, but we took the essence of it — the brocade print, the chartreuse silk — and created something new. Thus was born Mama’s Brocade Pochette.
The pochette carries forward the aesthetic and spirit of the box, but it also holds new delights of its own. Each one comes adorned with thoughtful details: a tassel, paired with our signature Type A jadeite bead. A small but meaningful gesture of beauty, crafted to accompany you in your own stories.
This Digital Trunk Show, Mama’s Brocade Pochette will be our gift to you with every 18KT gold purchase. It is our way of extending not just an object, but an inheritance of memory, craft, and colour.
We hope you will love it as much as we do.