Diamonds ain’t always a girl’s best friend. For Keijah Hamilton, amethyst is her homegirl.
Sparkling in a rich purple, the hue of royalty and Hamilton’s favorite color, amethyst has been revered since ancient times as the crystal of wisdom, clarity and a reliever of anxiety. These are traits Hamilton leaned on after jumping off the corporate ladder at a large global diamond jewelry retailer.
It was early 2021, a Monday morning in Huntsville, Ala. The weekend hadn’t been enough to recover from the burnout of corporate America hell. A general manager at the time at a retail store in the mall, Hamilton was working 60-hour weeks, but the pay wasn’t hitting. She felt guilty hiring workers for little more than minimum wage. She witnessed people she’d just hired get promoted over her, despite having been with the company since 2018. Pay raises were always a fight to approve.
Enough was enough. So Hamilton started her workday that Monday morning with a call to her district manager and told her that she was done. The district manager didn’t even fight to keep her. The nonchalant response solidified Hamilton’s decision to leave the company that same day to forge her own path towards success in an industry where the workforce is only two percent Black. She expanded on the skills she practiced in retail stores by making her own self-taught curriculum that consisted of YouTube videos and books on jewelry making techniques. She bought her own tools and sourced her own stones and crystals. In November 2021, just a couple months after quitting, Hamilton obtained a business license to open her own handmade gemstone jewelry and crystal store KeiStone Jewelry.
“I just started moving with intention and got very in tune with my spirituality at that time,” Hamilton said. “It takes a lot to own your own business, and I really had to start building up confidence within myself to be like, ‘OK. I can do this.’”
Hamilton’s timing wasn’t perfect, she had just…
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