Horoma Jewelry is the creation of husband and wife duo, John Moriarty and Stacy Snow. They met in 2008 while at Ohio Wesleyan University and have been together ever since. They shared a lot of adventures together over the years and in 2024 decided a jewelry business was the next frontier.

John started his apprenticeship in the jewelry industry in 2013 at the large American jewelry chain, Jared Jewelers. Moving from apprentice to the bench, John progressed on his road to mastery of repair and increasingly complicated work, pursuing new job opportunities along the way. After years of benchwork in several shops and many thousands of pieces behind him, John ventured out under his own name doing contract repairs, fabricating for other stores, and occasionally selling his own designs. He wanted to eventually develop his own brand, but at the time nothing felt right to repeat long term.

Stacy began her working life in the public library system but eventually began a career as a paralegal. Over the past 10 years she’s worked in social security/disability, environmental law, and now civil litigation. She’s explored artistic hobbies of her own, from flower arranging to painting, but her life-long creative passion has always been cooking. John has benefited immensely from this interest, and similarly, as John’s skills progressed, Stacy has enjoyed getting evermore elaborate jewelry pieces from him (now on her third engagement ring). They both always wished they could spend more time with each other, maybe even someday work together, but for years had no idea how to make that happen.

A first brand breakthrough came when a salesperson at a store John was working at shared her collection of high karat jewelry. Americans have long been educated about the dangers of high karat jewelry: it’s either too soft to wear safely, or too yellow to style generally in our white gold and rhodium plated era. But there they were: beautiful and long-worn pieces whose arresting color stole focus from all the other jewelry on John’s bench. A new love–or lust–for high karat gold was unlocked, and John was driven to start experimenting with 24k. He now knew the material he’d love to create a brand in, but what about the form or style?

A perk of achieving a high level of confidence and comfort in a shop is the freedom to listen to things while you work. Sizings, settings, and repairs all become second nature when you do them thousands of times, and that familiarity gives your mind space to listen. One Christmas, Stacy gifted John an audiobook subscription that unlocked a new source for design: history. Discovering particular interest in Imperial Rome, Spanish Hapsburg, and early American colonization, John devoured 47 audiobooks his first year and gained a greater sense of clarity on what he wanted to do. 

During one of their coffee-fueled Saturday morning talks, John brought up his latest vague ideas about a high karat jewelry brand shaped by history. John had meandered about these ideas many times before, but with sharper acuity than past mornings, Stacy understood what he was going for. “Ya, like an archetypal form of jewelry.” The phrase “archetypal jewelry” was the final piece of the puzzle for John. It encompassed everything he wanted to signify with this new brand and provided a thematic foundation to build on: a collection of jewelry that recovered a historic, even ancient sense of Beauty while recasting designs, stories and characters from history. 24k gold would fit perfectly with this idea, as would the inclusion of other purer alloys and unusual or antique material. Thrilled by the clarity of this vision, John and Stacy solidified the details of a plan over the next few months and settled on the name “Horoma” for their new brand:  “Vision” in Greek. 

Adorned by these elevating pieces of jewelry and art objects, John and Stacy imagine their customers as people searching for authenticity and taste in a world increasingly defined by artificiality, short-attention spans, and throw-away culture. They understand that accumulating things won’t provide life with meaning, but believe living with authentically-made, historically-rooted things—archetypal things—can provide people with the kind of meaningful texture and grounding that encourages them to create richer lives for themselves. 

To see how the plan is going, check out the store page!