Story

Hi! My name is Mia Sahlberg. I grew up in Skanör, a tiny village in the south of Sweden, right by the sea. I’ve been making things for as long as I can remember.

As a kid, I was always creating something. Sewing, cutting up clothes, making jewellery, playing with clay, taking photographs, drawing and printing on clothes — basically experimenting with anything and everything I could get my hands on. By my late teens, I was already selling some of my creations to friends and local shops.

Basically, I never really stopped making things.

I studied photography, art, psychology and fashion, and at 23 I moved to Paris and started my own clothing label. I created five collections that were sold in independent boutiques in Sweden and France. Later, I moved back to Sweden and opened a tiny studio/shop in the historic centre of Gothenburg, filled with my collections, reworked vintage pieces and jewellery.

In 2011, Paris called me back. I started working as a stylist with different photographers, and it was actually on a photoshoot that everything changed.

I wanted to cover a model’s fingers in silver rings but couldn’t find the ones I had imagined. So I thought: how hard can it be to make a silver ring?

Quite hard, it turns out.

But I went to the jewellery district in Paris, bought myself a basic silversmithing kit, set up in the living room of our 38 m² apartment and started learning. I watched YouTube tutorials. I experimented. I failed. I tried again. And again. And again.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I completely fell in love with silversmithing.

Friends started buying my pieces. Then friends of friends. Then shop owners began asking for collections. What had started on my living-room floor slowly became Studio Mia Sahlberg.

More than twelve years later, silver and I know each other pretty well.

I still love the transformation of it: something cold and hard becoming fluid, then solid again; something I can hammer, melt, bend, carve and texture until an idea that existed only in my head becomes something you can hold in your hand.

I don’t want my jewellery to look perfect. I love irregularity, texture, rough surfaces and the traces left by the hand that made them. Each piece is a tiny wearable sculpture — something precious, but something you can live in every day.

Making things this way takes time. So when you buy a piece from Studio Mia Sahlberg, you’re not just buying jewellery. You’re buying a little piece of art. A pair of hands. Craftsmanship, imagination, mistakes, experiments, dreams, hours of work — and occasionally some blood. My fingers can confirm this.

I’ve always been drawn to beauty, colour and self-expression. Clothes, jewellery and style have never felt superficial to me; they’re an extension of personality. A way of saying something without having to say anything at all.

And in a world where everything seems to move faster and faster, I’m happy to offer an alternative.

My jewellery is imagined and handcrafted by me in my small studio in Montpellier, in the south of France. I work exclusively with recycled sterling silver, alongside freshwater pearls, semi-precious stones and colourful glass beads.

Three years ago, I found a little shop tucked away in the historic centre of Montpellier, just a five-minute walk from my home. I stripped it back to its bare bones and slowly transformed it into my own little pastel-coloured world.

Today, it’s my studio, my shop and my creative playground. A place where ideas come to life, experiments happen, and there’s usually a new project taking over every available surface.

And if you ever find yourself in Montpellier, make sure to come by and say hi!