I started making intimate jewellery in 2012. I did not set out to build a brand or define a category. I set out to make something that did not exist in the form I thought it should — non-piercing intimate jewellery that was genuinely precise, made from materials that were honest, and designed around the actual geometry of the body rather than around how a body is imagined to look.
Fourteen years later, the work is essentially the same. The tools are the same. The materials are the same three I started with: copper, stainless steel, aluminium. The pieces are still made by my hands, in my studio, one at a time.
What has changed
The designs have evolved significantly. In the early years, the collection was narrower — focused primarily on nipple adornment, which remains the most requested category, and on navel pieces, which were among the first I made and continue to sell consistently. Over time, the work expanded: waist traces, pelvic connectors, facial pieces, the multi-axis structural pieces that connect points across the body’s full vertical range.
The vocabulary has also changed. In 2012, there was almost no public language for non-piercing intimate jewellery. Now the terms exist — anatomical adornment, tension-based jewellery, non-piercing body sculpture — and customers arrive already knowing what they are looking for.
What has not changed
The making is still manual. Every piece still starts as raw wire. Every piece is still checked by hand before it ships. I have never found a way to mechanise the tension calibration — the final adjustment that makes a piece hold correctly against a specific body — because it requires a sensitivity to material and geometry that cannot be programmed. Read more about how a REPIOR piece is made.
The relationship with customers has not changed in the ways that matter. People write to me with questions they cannot ask anywhere else — about their anatomy, their metal sensitivities, whether a piece will work for their specific body. I answer every message personally.
What the work has taught me
The most significant thing fourteen years of making intimate jewellery has taught me is that the body is consistently more interesting than any design I can bring to it. Every bespoke commission, every customer who describes their anatomy in detail and asks whether something is possible — each one reveals something I had not considered from that angle before.
This is why the exploration of new forms and placements remains the most compelling part of the work. Not the making of known pieces — but the asking of new questions: what happens when a piece connects these two points? What geometry allows a wire to hold at this specific angle against this specific contour?
The body keeps asking. The studio keeps answering. Fourteen years in, that exchange is still the whole of it.
Crafted with Passion. Worn with Confidence.
Pilar · Designer & Founder · REPIOR® · Handcrafted in the UK since 2012
Related reading: How a REPIOR piece is made · From the archive · The story of the REPIOR NERVE · Shop REPIOR
More from the studio: How a REPIOR piece is made · 14 years of making · The REPIOR mark
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