The Materialist : Monica Stephenson

Marc Bridge and Monica Stephenson, Anza Gems Worldwide Headquarters, Seattle, WA

Monica Stephenson is the kind of guest who makes you see a familiar object—one you might already love—like it’s brand new. In this episode of The Materialist, we sit together in her Seattle office overlooking Lake Union and the skyline, and we follow a thread that runs from the jewelry counter in a Midwest college town all the way to artisanal gem mines in East Africa—and then back again, into the hands of the designers and collectors who ultimately give these stones a second life.

What unfolds is not just Monica’s career story (though it’s a fantastic one), but a bigger argument about what jewelry can do when it’s treated as both beauty and infrastructure: an object that sparks desire on the surface, and—if you care to go deeper—a vehicle for livelihoods, dignity, and long-term economic power.

A retailer’s education: why the “floor” matters

Monica’s origin story is refreshingly unromantic in the best way: she starts in retail in the early 1990s, selling jewelry while studying art history and fine art at the University of Iowa. That experience, she argues, isn’t a detour—it’s the foundation. Retail trains you to listen, to understand what customers actually respond to, and to translate a piece of jewelry into a reason someone chooses to bring it into their life.

It’s also where she first feels the pull of what she calls the “small sculpture” quality of jewelry—the idea that a piece can be materially precious, artistically rigorous, and emotionally immediate all at once. She remembers being captivated by the intention and artistry of emerging designers, a shift away from mass-manufactured sameness toward jewelry with a point of view. You flip a bracelet over, she says, and it’s as beautiful on the underside as it is on the top—craft as moral clarity.

There’s a personal echo too: Monica didn’t grow up in a jewelry family in the classic sense, but her father worked outside sales for a New York designer and would have merchandise spread across the kitchen table. So the objects were always there—close enough to normalize, just far enough away to remain slightly magical.

And then she says something that is both funny and true: we’re all magpies on some level. We like the shiny things. But for Monica, the “bug” goes deeper than sparkle. It’s the entire ecosystem—materials, workmanship, makers, and the people who carry the knowledge. It’s a love affair with process.

Tech, jewelry, and the limits of a “flat detail page”

From the jewelry counter, Monica’s path bends into the early internet. In the late 1990s she buys the domain for a diamond referral concept and builds what amounts to a matchmaking site connecting consumers to local retailers. It’s an early clue of what becomes a recurring theme in her work: jewelry is relational. It moves through networks of trust, story, and access.

That blend of jewelry fluency and tech curiosity leads to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: Amazon asks her to help launch its jewelry store in 2003. Monica becomes, in her words, “the tech translator to the jewelry industry,” straddling two worlds and learning to speak both languages.

What’s especially interesting is her reflection on why Amazon’s vision didn’t fully match the reality. Jewelry can translate to digital—today we have video, richer storytelling, and much better tools for dimensionality and nuance—but at the time, the attempt was to fit a complicated, largely non-branded category into a UPC-driven system. Watches could behave like that. Diamonds and gemstones couldn’t, at least not cleanly. Even within diamonds, there’s real variance from stone to stone, and the effort to “shoehorn” that complexity into a flat product page was harder than it looked.

When I ask what she wished the platform could have been, her answer is basically a thesis for modern jewelry commerce: more immersive visuals, more dimensional truth, and more designer storytelling—who made it, why they made it, what the process is, and what’s embedded inside the object beyond its specs. The implication is clear: if you remove story, you remove meaning—and jewelry is meaning-driven.

I Dazzle: the closet years and the power of deep storytelling

After Amazon, Monica steps back for family life, has two daughters, and then—like a lot of high-functioning creatives—hits the point where being “only” a parent isn’t enough for her brain. She needs a creative outlet that isn’t organized around snack time.

That’s where I Dazzle returns, this time as a blog. She subscribes to the industry magazines again, starts writing, and—nudged by her husband—channels her ideas into WordPress. What follows is the kind of grassroots editorial work that, in hindsight, feels inevitable: she travels to studios, interviews designers, attends trade shows, reports on trends, and asks the kinds of thoughtful questions that draw people out.

One of the most charming moments in the conversation is when the late Cindy Edelstein recognizes Monica across a trade show floor: “You’re I Dazzle,” and tells her she’s required reading. Monica, who has been writing essentially “in a closet” assuming she has seven readers, is suddenly confronted with the reality that she’s built a real audience—and that the industry is listening.

Why did it strike a chord? Monica thinks it’s because she was doing something that wasn’t common yet: making the designer and the studio legible. You could see the finished piece, but you couldn’t always access the depth behind it, even in a retail environment. Her blog became a window into the people and the process. It served trade readers and everyday consumers alike, and it sometimes even acted as a matchmaker—connecting retailers to designers, and designers to specific gemstones Monica spotlighted (Tucson DM requests included).

It’s also notable how she describes the work: “purely editorial,” not monetized, and financially punishing in the way many truly editorial things are. But she loved it. It was immersive. And it prepared her—without her knowing it—for what came next.

The trip that changes everything: “from the dirt to the finger”

The hinge point in Monica’s story comes almost by accident: she sees a tweet about a documentary traveling to East Africa to film the journey of a gemstone “from the dirt to the finger.” The premise hits her like lightning. She DMs the organizer. They ask if she wants to come—as the resident blogger, “documenting the documentary.”

She does her due diligence, then makes the kind of leap that feels irrational until it becomes destiny: she flies 9,000 miles to the edge of a mine with a group of strangers, having never been to Africa, never been to a source community, never even visited a Montana sapphire mine. It’s the first time she’s seeing the beginning of the supply chain that she’s spent her entire life engaging only at the end.

What she finds is not what the average consumer imagines when they hear “mining.” In East Africa, much of the gemstone mining she witnesses is artisanal and small-scale—surface and alluvial work rather than industrial excavation. This isn’t a corporate capital-markets machine with helicopters and sonar. It’s shovels, picks, hand labor, remote terrain, and extreme uncertainty. Miners might work for weeks or months with nothing to show for it. The labor-to-reward ratio is brutal.

And yet Monica doesn’t describe it with pity. She describes it with respect: passionate people doing backbreaking work, often as a rational alternative to farming in regions with few options. Many are, in a sense, entrepreneurs—independently funded, operating with minimal infrastructure and limited access to tools, geology, or market knowledge.

This is where the episode becomes quietly radical: it reframes the romance of gemstones. The “magic” we associate with a finished stone is real, but the cost of that magic is usually invisible.

“We can fix this.” The naïve thought that becomes a real company

Monica returns to Seattle buzzing with adrenaline and ideas. She writes obsessively. Somewhere in that writing, a napkin business plan emerges. Her first thought is naïve in the way all ambitious plans start: the problem is just access—education, opportunity, resources, market connection. If she can connect the dots, then the system can become fairer.

By the end of 2014, she has a fully formed model. She names it Anza—Swahili for “begin”—because the whole thing feels slightly insane and totally outside the boundaries of what she’s “qualified” to do. And so she begins.

She goes back to East Africa, buys gems at a regional gem market, visits mines, starts building relationships with brokers and dealers, learns export realities, and gradually develops a process. There’s an acknowledgment of the “wild west” element—she’s an unusual buyer in these contexts, a visible outsider, someone not many people have encountered at the market tables. She makes mistakes. Some are costly. But she keeps showing up, keeps buying, keeps investing. Over time, the spectacle becomes credibility.

What’s striking is how she describes her approach to cutting: she often gives cutters carte blanche with the rough, allowing them to “work their magic.” That creative trust—miner to cutter to designer—becomes part of Anza’s identity. The brand is known for unusual cutting, and designers are drawn to it because it feels like the stone has lived a full creative life before it ever reaches a jeweler’s bench.

And Monica learns the business in the only way you truly can: trial by fire, with live capital, sometimes sweating in the bush. Even valuation isn’t purely rational. Color can be emotional. Sometimes the stone that “should” be most valuable isn’t; sometimes the afterthought becomes the star because it resonates with human desire.

Moyo Gems and the work of building a market

As Anza grows, Monica also becomes central to Moyo Gems (“heart” in Swahili), a collaboration that includes commercial partners and the international NGO Pact, plus partnerships with organizations like the Tanzania Women Miners Association and Kenya’s AFWAK. The project is structured around a clear goal: bring market access to artisanal miners—especially women.

This part of the episode is one of the most powerful because it gets specific about what “impact” actually looks like. Monica notes that artisanal miners are marginalized in general, but women miners are doubly excluded—often invisible, literally working on the periphery, combing through tailings. Globally, women may represent roughly a third of artisanal miners; in their region, the estimate is lower. Regardless of the exact percentage, the point is the same: women are present and essential, but structurally pushed away from the power centers of the supply chain.

So they create “market days” in villages—multi-day events where miners bring stones and sit across the table from buyers in direct dialogue. There’s no forced selling. Buyers don’t have to purchase everything. But what’s revolutionary is feedback: why a stone does or doesn’t sell, what the market is looking for, what characteristics matter, and how to negotiate with information instead of vulnerability.

Monica emphasizes something that feels like a guiding principle: ask, don’t assume. When they ask women miners what they want, the answers aren’t always what outsiders predict. One example: women want mobile payments because it gives them control—no outward sign of a transaction, no one can seize the cash, and the password belongs to them. That’s empowerment through financial privacy.

Miners often ask for equipment—excavators, tools—and Monica doesn’t dismiss it, but she also doesn’t romanticize the idea that machinery alone is the answer. She’s increasingly focused on pairing local knowledge with modern geology and practical science, and on what she sees as the biggest lever: market access plus story.

A full-circle bracelet: Anna J. and the moment jewelry becomes proof

One story from the episode lands like a punch of joy.

A miner named Anna J. is the first registered in their market system and one of the earliest participants. She shows up consistently, mainly with sapphires. Then her name disappears. Monica learns she had a stroke. A year or two later, she returns—speech impaired, physically affected, but mining again because it’s a crucial income source.

At a recent market day, Anna arrives smiling, with a pile of sapphires. Monica is able to show her what her stones became: a line bracelet made by designer Emily P. Wheeler, using Anna’s emerald-cut sapphires. Because Monica’s team has worked to keep parcels intact and traceable (including partnerships with cutters willing to preserve provenance rather than mixing stones by size), the bracelet isn’t just “sapphires from Tanzania.” It’s sapphires from Anna.

Anna watches the video, zooming in, speechless. Emily shares the story, and the bracelet sells quickly—proof that meaning can move product, and that provenance isn’t merely a compliance exercise. It’s a value generator.

When I tell Monica this is “why it’s special,” she agrees—and adds a nuance I love: customers come in different buckets. Some buy because it’s beautiful, period. Some engage moderately with the story. And some are lit up by the story—where it came from, who it touched, what it changed—and that story becomes the reason to buy.

She doesn’t judge any of those buyer types. In fact, she frames it as the unique genius of jewelry: it can speak on a purely physical level, but the deeper you go, the more meaningful it can become.

Not philanthropy: the case for an economic engine

If there’s a single idea that defines Monica’s mission, it’s this: this is a business, not a charity.

She’s blunt about it because she’s seen what happens when the work is framed as philanthropy. Philanthropy can be episodic. People move on. Funding cycles end. Attention shifts. And, in her words, “the continent of Africa is very tired of pure philanthropy.”

Instead, Monica is committed to building a sustainable economic foothold—a flywheel where miners have baseline financial security, and then responsibility and long-term improvement can follow. Survival first. Once survival is stabilized, people can invest in better practices, education, equipment, and community outcomes.

Her metaphor is perfect: don’t give someone a tractor; create the conditions where they build a business that needs a tractor.

She also points to a subtle but profound marker of progress: women moving into broker roles at market tables. Historically, brokers were men—an easier, higher-leverage position that controls information and pricing. Monica describes watching a woman broker sit beside an older woman miner, put her arm around her, and carefully walk through each line of a transaction, helping her count her money and understand exactly what was happening. Monica sees it as the point of it all: women moving from subsistence into authority without losing the uniquely human care that makes communities work.

Progress shows up elsewhere too: improvements in local faceting through upgraded equipment, the rise of youth workshops, growing prosperity in the region, and ambitious projects like the GEM Legacy campus that will expand vocational training. And on the business side, Anza itself has become something real: employees, growing demand, daily DMs asking where to buy and how to connect. Ten years ago it was Monica in a closet. Now it’s a functioning engine.

What’s next: translating trust into systems

Monica’s next challenge is the one so many mission-driven supply chains face: how do you turn meticulous, relationship-based work into a durable system without losing the soul?

She’s hired a compliance and supply chain expert and wants to formalize what Anza has been doing informally but carefully—creating a digital representation of provenance and process that can travel with a stone. They’ve explored blockchain, but implementation at source is hard. The goal isn’t buzzwords; it’s transferability—making it easier for anyone who buys an Anza stone to also inherit the story and the proof.

At the same time, she’s committed to the on-the-ground work: continuing to show up, especially for the women miners, and continuing to address challenges that were articulated years ago but remain only partially solved.

She ends the episode, fittingly, by talking about what she’s wearing: an extraordinary alexandrite ring, a necklace made for her 30th anniversary that includes many Anza gems, and bracelets made from Tanzanian beads polished by students and assembled by youth artisans. Jewelry as daily reminder. Jewelry as visible progress.

And then she points our attention to another group that’s often overlooked: women gem cutters—faceters whose work is math, science, and art at once. They are the antithesis of the “black box” fantasy that a machine spits out a finished gem. Every stone has its own optical reality, its own refractive index and critical angles, its own quirks and inclusions to navigate. The cutter doesn’t just “finish” the stone—they collaborate with it.

If you love jewelry, this conversation will make you love it more. And if you’ve ever wondered why certain objects feel “worth it,” Monica offers a compelling answer: sometimes the worth is beauty. Sometimes it’s story. And sometimes it’s the rare case where beauty and story fuse into something that isn’t just lovely to wear—but powerful to participate in.

If you want to find Monica, she’s at Anza and on Instagram as I Dazzle—still doing what she’s always done: making the world behind jewelry more visible, more human, and more meaningful.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit atpresent.substack.com