MERMAID started with one pendant: a gold mermaid tail with a 2 mm sapphire, made for a friend who could not find one that was not plastic. We made forty, sold them in three weeks, and then had to learn how to make jewelry properly. Four years later we are still two people, still ordering in small batches, still photographing everything on white.
01
The jewelry is cast and finished in a workshop in Madrid that also works for two other small brands. The swimwear is cut and sewn in Porto, in a family factory that produces for us and for a French label. The straw totes come from one workshop in Andalusia. We visit all three, and we pay before production, not after the season.
02
Sixty pairs of earrings is what we can sell without discounting. Eighty swimsuits per colour is the minimum the Portuguese mill accepts for a custom dye. That is the whole business model: we would rather sell out and wait than hold stock and put it on sale in January. It also means the shop looks empty sometimes, which is honest.
03
No dropshipping, no stock photos passed off as our products, no invented reviews, no fake scarcity. The two reviews on each product page are from people who agreed to have their first name and city shown. If we have not made a sale yet, the page has no reviews instead of a placeholder.
04
About €9 of brass and plating, €11 of casting and finishing, €4 of packaging, €7 of card fees and platform costs, €12 of the batch we could not sell, and the rest is labour, studio and the time it takes to photograph and describe a product properly. We are not the cheapest and we are not trying to be.
05
Because a beach photo tells you how good the photographer is, not how big the earring is. White also means we cannot hide a dull plating or a pearl with a spot. It is harder to shoot and it makes the shop look quieter than the competition, which is fine.
