The Folder — 12 Years of Listening Before We Made a Single Piece
The Folder: 12 Years of Listening Before We Made a Single Piece
Every brand has an origin story. Most of them are polished. Rehearsed. Designed to sound inevitable in retrospect — as though the founder always knew exactly what they were building. LOTTEDS is not one of those brands.
Our origin story doesn't start with a vision. It doesn't start with a design sketch or a business plan or a eureka moment in a workshop. It starts with a folder. A plain manila folder of the sort you'd find in any office supply cupboard. And inside that folder — which still exists, which Livia still keeps in her office, which she still opens when she needs to remember why she started — are hundreds of photographs. Hundreds of emails. Hundreds of voices.
This is the story of that folder. And it's the truest story of how LOTTEDS came to exist.
The Photographs
The photographs in the folder are not professional. They were taken by customers — on phones, on digital cameras, occasionally on whatever device was at hand when the reaction appeared. They show fingers circled in green. Necks marked with red, inflamed patches. Earlobes so swollen that the earring backing had disappeared into the flesh. Wrists with rashes in the exact shape of a bracelet.
Each photograph was attached to an email or accompanied by a phone call. Each one represented a moment when someone looked at their own body and wondered: what's wrong with me?
Livia collected these photographs not because anyone asked her to. There was no "customer complaint database" at the companies she worked for — just a customer service inbox that had to be cleared by the end of each day. The photographs were supposed to be deleted after the complaint was resolved. Livia kept copies. She printed them out. She put them in the folder. She didn't know why at the time. She just knew — with an instinct she describes now as "the closest thing to a calling I've ever felt" — that these photographs mattered. That someone needed to pay attention to them. That they were evidence of a problem that the industry had decided wasn't worth solving.
The Question
Running through almost every communication in the folder — through the emails and the phone calls and the handwritten letters that occasionally arrived — was a single question, phrased in different ways but always meaning the same thing:
"Is it me? Am I allergic to jewellery? Is there something wrong with my skin?"
The question broke Livia's heart every time she encountered it. Because she knew the answer. The answer was no. It was never the customer. It was the materials — the brass, the nickel, the copper alloys, the thin electroplating that wore through in weeks. The jewellery industry had known about these problems for decades. The solutions existed — better base metals, PVD bonding, nickel-free alloys. But implementing those solutions cost money. And in an industry built on volume and repeat purchases, there was no incentive to make things that lasted.
Livia tried to explain this to her employers. She brought data. She brought the photographs. She proposed changes. The response was always some version of: too expensive. Too complicated. Not our problem.
So she kept adding to the folder. Year after year. Photograph after photograph. The same question, over and over, from people who had been failed by an industry that refused to change.
The Call That Changed Everything
Among the hundreds of communications in the folder, there's one that Livia still talks about. It was a phone call from a woman in her sixties — Livia remembers her voice as "warm but tired, like someone who'd been having the same conversation for decades." The woman explained that she hadn't worn jewellery in over thirty years. Not since her wedding day. Her ears had reacted to the earrings. Her neck had reacted to the necklace. Her finger had reacted to the ring — the ring her husband had saved for, chosen carefully, placed on her finger in front of everyone they loved. By the end of the wedding night, her finger was red and itching. By the end of the week, the ring was in a drawer. It had stayed there for thirty years.
"She wasn't calling to complain," Livia says. "She was calling to ask if there was anything — anything at all — that she could wear. She said she'd seen a pair of earrings in a shop window and for a moment, before she remembered, she'd wanted them. And then she'd remembered. And she'd gone home and called us instead."
Livia couldn't help her. The company she worked for didn't make anything that would work for this woman. She took down the woman's details — name, phone number, address — and put them in the folder. Then she sat at her desk and cried. Not because the call was unusual. Because it wasn't.
That woman's name is still in the folder. When LOTTEDS launched, Livia sent her a package — a pair of 316L steel earrings, a snake chain necklace, and a handwritten note that said: "It was never you. It was the jewellery. Here's jewellery that finally loves you back." The woman wrote back. She'd worn the earrings every day since they arrived. She was seventy-one years old. She hadn't worn earrings in thirty-five years. She'd cried when she put them in. So did Livia, reading the letter.
What the Folder Taught Us
The folder is not a marketing prop. It's not something we show to journalists or photograph for social media. It's a private document — a record of 12 years of failure by an industry that knew better and chose not to do better.
But the folder taught Livia something that became the foundation of LOTTEDS. It taught her that the most important skill in jewellery is not design. It's not gemmology. It's not metallurgy. It's listening. Listening to people describe what's happening to their bodies. Listening to the shame and confusion in their voices when they ask if they're the problem. Listening to the hope when they ask if there's anything that might work for them.
Every piece of LOTTEDS jewellery is an answer to someone in that folder. The woman who couldn't wear earrings. The man who thought his skin was too sensitive for a watch. The teenager whose ears swelled up every time she tried a new pair of studs. The bride who put her wedding ring in a drawer and never wore it again.
We don't know all their names. But we know their stories. And we build for them.
Why This Matters Now
LOTTEDS is a different company today than it was in 2020. We have a design collective. A proper atelier. Customers across Europe and beyond. But the folder is still in Livia's office. And the question that runs through it — "is it me?" — is still the question we're answering.
If you've ever asked that question — if you've ever looked at your own skin and wondered what was wrong with you — we want you to know something. It was never you. It was the materials. And we fixed the materials.
That's what the folder taught us. That's what we build for. And that's why we're not done yet.
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