There are evenings that begin with the right company and end as something more. Homemade bread on the table, a bowl of pasta still steaming, the kind of light that settles over Munich just before the sun disappears behind the tree crowns of the Englischer Garten above the Isar river. It is in precisely this atmosphere that created the perfect setting for our Jewellery dinner at IRMASWORLD last week with friends.
VIERI is a Berlin fine jewellery label founded in 2015 by Guya Merkle, a third-generation jeweller with Italian roots and a particular kind of restlessness. The turning point came in 2012, when a visit to gold mines in the Peruvian Andes made the conditions behind luxury impossible to overlook. Rather than look away, Merkle built an entire company around the question of what responsible gold could look like. The answer is VIERI: every piece is crafted in 18-karat gold sourced exclusively from recycled or urban-mined material, and three percent of all revenue flows directly to the Earthbeat Foundation, which Merkle founded to pursue structural change within the global gold industry. The sapphires come from fair-trade mines in Sri Lanka via partner Ceylons Munich. The quartz stones in the Cloud Collection are cut in Idar-Oberstein. Nothing here is incidental.
The cloud itself is the brand’s defining motif, and Merkle has spoken about choosing it with care. As she told IRMASWORLD in a previous conversation: she was looking for a symbol of transformation, something simultaneously strong and delicate, something that carries stories from one place to another. The cloud is all of that. It is also, in her hands, a quietly bold design statement: organic in form, generous in volume, unmistakable on the wrist or finger without ever announcing itself.
The label’s production is split between Berlin and Córdoba, with an emphasis on short supply chains and long-standing relationships with the goldsmiths who execute each piece. Family heritage informs the whole enterprise in a way that is difficult to manufacture: the name VIERI itself comes from Guya’s father, Eddy Vieri, who took over the family workshop in Pforzheim at seventeen after his own father’s death, and who died in 2007 leaving Guya to carry the work forward at twenty-one. There is weight in the name. There is also lightness in what she has made of it.
