While Brookfield announced the cohort of vendors for the Brookfield Shops on March 10, Nestor Valencia said he, his wife, Giselle Cortes, and their family have been building up their inventory of jewelry since the beginning of the year to sell in their shop at the retail incubator program.
As the owners and proprietors of Organic Jewelry, Valencia and Cortes have a literal hand in every piece of jewelry the business sells. In an interview with the Landmark, Valencia and the couple’s daughter Miranda Valencia-Cortes said each family member has their own role in the process.
“We all have our little tasks because it’s really a family business,” Valencia-Cortes said. “When it comes to the creative process, my mom is the main one, but sometimes I help, sometimes my dad helps, and when it comes to assembly, we’re all kind of helping. We all have our little station. We all know what to do.”
Both agreed Cortes was the driving creative force behind the business’s designs, but she was not available for the interview.
Valencia said the business got started in 2016 after the family emigrated from Colombia in 2012.
“My wife, she was a dentist in Colombia, but here, she got to start all over again. It’s going to take too long, and it’s expensive [to become a licensed dentist]. Let’s be realistic,” he said.
They got the push to start the company after visiting extended family in New York. Those relatives ran a similar business. When they returned to the Chicago area — as Brookfield residents since 2014 — they operated Organic Jewelry exclusively as a pop-up at street fairs, markets and special events, both in Chicagoland and across Illinois towns like Decatur, Geneva and Galena.
Valencia and Valencia-Cortes said the family sources all of their materials — from orange peels, dried flowers and acacia seeds to vintage watch parts — from Colombia.
“Our on-season is usually the summer, so between May and September, around there. In the months that we’re not in season, we’re all working really hard to be able to get everything,” Valencia-Cortes said. “We travel to Colombia, try to get all of our materials that we need, then we travel back.”
She emphasized that the family makes sure they source their materials sustainably and ethically. She said they previously used tagua nuts in their jewelry but made the choice to stop in order to stay within their morals.
“The government is renting the land,” Valencia said.
“It’s a really long story, really, really sad story,” Valencia-Cortes added. “We’re very careful with our country and our soils, so working tagua was just not ethical anymore.”
Once they have their materials, there’s still some sorting to be done. Valencia said many of the watch parts they bring home with them aren’t usable for the jewelry his wife envisions. He said Cortes’s steady hand and eye for precision from her history as a dentist enable her to create meticulous pieces of jewelry with whatever materials are available, whether that’s laying flowers to create a miniature scene or deconstructing watches piece by piece and removing rust from them.
“We’re expecting to sell at least 1,200” pieces of jewelry this year based on their sales from last year, Valencia said. “We already got 700 done. We got another 600 almost ready.”
Valencia said part of the business’s appeal is its low prices for consumers. He said the jewelry ranges in price from $15 for small earrings made with preserved plants up to $60 for more intricate pieces made with watches or $120 for pieces made from rare coffee beans.
“We went into downtown, and, for instance, this one is $25. Something like this in downtown, not the same, but something alike, they sell it for $60,” he said. “We’re the ones who make it and everything, so why should we inflate the price? If you keep the prices low, affordable, it’s much better.”
When it came time for the family to present Organic Jewelry before Brookfield’s assembled panel of jurors, Valencia said he had high expectations for himself.
“This is kind of funny, because I told my wife, ‘I’m a math teacher, so I’m used to talking in front of people,’” he said. “I don’t know if I lost my touch, but, man, I got everything ready. We got all these pieces ready to show and everything … I was really nervous, and everything got messed up. The last one came out first, the first came out last. I was like, ‘What happened? What happened with me?’”
Despite how the presentation went, Valencia-Cortes said the entire family erupted with joy when they learned they had secured a spot at the Brookfield Shops.
“I was in one of my classes at college — I go to Concordia [University Chicago] — and my mom sent the screenshot of the email that they sent, and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’” she said. “My mom has so much creativity to start all of this and branch out so much, to the watch parts and to start with everything else. I was really proud of my mom.”
“We sent everything to New York, everything to Colombia. Everybody was calling. ‘You were accepted! I told you, I told you! You got something special here,’” Valencia said.
Both said they appreciated the organization and clear expectations that Brookfield officials have brought to the process since Organic Jewelry was accepted into the Brookfield Shops program.
“Being clear and really organized, I think everyone appreciated it, and they’re really trying to create a community in all of us,” Valencia-Cortes said. “We can lean on each other, we can talk to each other, we can learn from each other.”
While the family aspires to have their own brick-and-mortar space, they said they’re prioritizing setting up an online presence within the program so they no longer have to transport inventory to pop-up locations across the state.
“My wife, she wants to put up an online shop, but we don’t know how to do it,” Valencia said. “That is something that I wish for her, that she can just do something from home and still continue with this.”
“It’s very physically draining, I would say, because bringing all the things there is really heavy, and there’s other stuff that you have to keep in mind. Sometimes you get hungry, but you can’t go anywhere. You have to stay there,” Valencia-Cortes added. “Another one of our goals to create an online place people can go to like Instagram, on Facebook, TikTok. Using all those social platforms to grow more, I think, is very important to us.”
