The Finest Stack designer, Annika Thomas, took a circuitous path towards jewelry design that continues to inform her approach to the creative process. As a child, she underwent a major corrective surgery that resulted in a year’s-worth of hospital stays where she had ample time to express her creativity through drawing and a burgeoning obsession with fashion. Raised in a loving family with her mother, father and three stepsiblings, she was also hugely influenced by her fashionable aunts, Jean, Hope and Margie. Annika went on to become a teacher, then a physical therapist, before the loss of her father left her feeling dark and untethered.

Retreating to nature to sooth her soul, Annika realized that leaning on her sense of creativity through jewelry design was a powerful source of heeling. She was able to express the resilience she saw in nature through her work, which served as a reminder of her own resilience. She looks at her jewelry as a celebration of all facets of life, including the challenges that helped form one’s world view. In a recent article in JCK Magazine, Annika says, “Our lives and our stories make us interesting, story-filled, captivating beings, and we are all struggling along together, and we are all FINE: F*cked up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotionally unavailable.”