Ruby Rodriguez

Brand Anthropology · Global Sourcing · Material Culture Research

Some research stays in the archive. Some sourcing stays in the supply chain. This practice connects both — and everything in between.

A PhD in cultural anthropology. Twenty years of ethnographic fieldwork across jewelry markets, artisan workshops, and museum archives. A supply chain built from the ground up across four continents. A retail concept designed around the body's relationship to adornment. The same intelligence, applied at every point in the process.

At the center of this work is a finding that has held across every field site and every market: certain forms recur independently across cultures separated by oceans and millennia — the disc, the spiral, the serpent, the feather, the eye. Not because they traveled. Because the human conditions they respond to have never changed. These are the Perpetual Archetypes. Understanding why they resonate — and with whom, and when — is what separates a collection that endures from one that merely dazzles.

This is material culture research that moves — from the archive to the atelier, from the field to the factory floor, from the object's history to the consumer who reaches for it before they know why.

Each of the five phases of research described below is documented in depth. A visual portfolio of field photography, prototypes, sourcing documentation, and editorial work — as well as a full research index of papers for each phase — is available upon request. Reach out here to request access.