Globe-trotting jewelry designer Karissma Yve opening showroom in hometown of Detroit

In a quiet, metal and concrete barrack, tucked inside a formerly forgotten street off Grand River in Detroit, Karissma Yve is living her dream.

There she spends her days and nights thinking, writing poetry and designing one-of-a-kind jewelry from precious metals, all capturing phases of her life.

Bracelets that look like small snakes rest on metal shelves.

Sterling silver rings that capture the creator’s and wearer’s imagination rest in a tray of black aquarium rocks.

There’s necklaces and silverware and fragrances and leather handbags, all, she says, reflect her brand — Xenophora.

She relates xenophora, a sea snail, to jewelry as she believes that when people carry jewelry, it becomes a part of them.

“We as humans are a collective of things that we’ve experienced and gone through. So I just wanted to pay homage to that, thinking about the experience that I went through growing up in Detroit in the area that’s hit with a lot of poverty and blight. That was something I carried with me and I was able to transmute that into something that is beautiful and wearable and something that people have forever and pass it down to their families.

At 24, the Detroit native is self-taught – in jewelry design, casting and business.

She owns two business, Xenophora and Casting De Khrysopeia, and her line is carried by 16 retailers in Japan, Italy, France, Russia and now, thanks to her recent Motor City Match grant award, in Detroit.

Yve and her five siblings grew up in the Brightmoor neighborhood on Detroit’s west side. She said she struggled with homelessness and physical and emotional abuse. Yet still at a young age she knew exactly what she wanted to do — create things.

When she was 12, she decided to make a blazer but she needed metal buttons. She knew that it would be hard to find them, so she taught herself to make them. From that point, she said, she’s been interested in casting. After graduating from Southfield Lathrup High School, she enrolled at the College of Creative Studies and stayed for six weeks before dropping out under the premise that she could teach herself what she needed to know.

“I was already on the pathway of being the person that I wanted to be,” Yve said. “I felt that if I remained in school, I would’ve invested a lot of money and acquired a lot of debt. So I took the risk of dropping out so that I could focus on developing my brand …

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