Walking into Merzatta on Cattano Avenue in Morristown is something special. And I mention the name of the street intentionally. Strolling through this tucked-away neighborhood is a quietly adventurous experience. It’s charming and private, and you know all those out-of-the-way special places are located somewhere like here.
“It’s an odd little shop,” owner Danielle Merzatta says fondly of her jewelry store. Growing up in Morristown, she values her neighbors and the people who have been with her along the way. “The fabric of the people who come to Cattano Avenue is what really makes Morristown matter.”
And it’s her ability to observe, notice, and internalize that makes her jewelry so incredibly unique. She creates moments that are sentimental. You may not realize you’ve lived those same moments until you recognize the shape of a leaf or texture of a stone in one of her designs. She explains, “The art of noticing is the name of the game. In the community you’re in, you are the noticer. Artists are wired for that.”
Danielle and her husband, Chris, started their careers working together on a large-scale architectural build on the island of Mustique in the Grenadines. “While we worked on the island, we curated this collection of things, just like you can’t resist a seashell in your pocket.”
After returning home to the U.S. to have their daughter, they found their creativity affected by the scale of their studio space. Danielle says, “When you’re in an apartment on a dining room table, it’s not quite the same as when you’re in a university workshop with full-sized equipment. Everything gets smaller. You’re not building airplanes on your kitchen table.”
It was a friend’s request for custom wedding rings that began the Merzatta’s journey into jewelry. “We were on the art fair circuit for ten years. We drove all over the country with a minivan full of stuff, popped up a little white tent with our glass cases, and showed our jewelry in 42 states.”
It was those years of brand discovery that shaped who they are today. “There are actually three pieces to Merzatta that really matter,” Danielle explains.
Core Collection: “We wholesale these pieces to stores, which is a huge form library that is the core Merzatta in a design sense. One of the things I love about our Core Collection is that when you slice it in different ways, it can be really gothy, really sweet, or really bohemian. It can curate itself.
One of a Kind: “These pieces have elements or roots of the Core Collection, but they’re obviously a one-of-a-kind piece. We used to release a lot of our one-of-a-kind collections. Now I have to wait longer for my own time to be given to my one-of-a-kinds. My time is sold to whatever custom work we’re commissioned for.”
Custom Designs: “These can definitely be tied to those forms we use for the Core Collection. Sometimes they’re completely new metal builds. The fact that you can have anything you want made by someone you trust is kind of exciting. With custom, we’re trying to discover which moment you’re trying to capture, and the metalwork may or may not be “Merzatta-looking.”
And what is “Merzatta-looking?”
Without hesitation, Danielle says, “The language of organic textures. Sometimes it feels like these things have been found out there. Most of the time, the textures are one step removed from the original. A sweetgum fruit that’s carved or sliced or changed in some way.”
Just like entering her store, slipping on a piece of Merzatta jewelry feels a bit enchanted. Natural elements are everywhere, whether wood shapes are carved from metal or exotic little gems peek through 18K gold. “We use pinion pine, anytime you see a linear stripe in our work, it’s carved from the inside vein structure of a pinion pine cone. Our Peony Garden collection is the seeds and stems of the peony flower. There’s a cedar branch we use all the time from Silverton, Oregon.”
And like nature is for everyone, so are their designs. Danielle says, “As children, we have this desire to pick up rocks and sticks, and that desire isn’t gender specific. Your 7-year-old’s pocket comes home filled with rocks for the same reason your husband might stack those stone bracelets or collect watches. Nature offers these shapes that are just great.”
They often use the term rodeo. “There’s the umbrella pod ring, then there’s the umbrella pod rodeo ring, and that just means upped in size. So the rodeo size is typically moving up into men’s sizes.” Danielle attributes this inspiration to the fact that they run their business as a husband-and-wife duo, evolving many of their designs together.
A lifetime of curation and love of art shapes the brand the community sees when they walk through the doors of Merzatta. “The amount of care that small shop owners put into it is something that you don’t get when you shop elsewhere. The amount of care we put into what you are wearing—we care so much.”
Learn more: https://merzatta.com/
Danielle Merzatta is a lifelong artist. While attending the Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, she took a seminar in metal that opened up a whole new world.
“I felt like when I was touching metal, I was touching something that was really easy to understand. There was some ease that I could say less when the material itself had its own power,” Danielle explains.
She earned a Master’s in Metalsmithing at the highly prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art. Although her beginnings were in architecture and large-scale pieces, a friend asked her to design their wedding rings.
“The universe was showing me that metal things can matter when they’re small.”