By Benjamin Sberro 

I did not choose jewelry. Jewelry chose me, the way most things that matter choose you, quietly, when you are not looking for them, when you are simply showing up and doing what is asked and paying attention because attention is the only thing you have to give.

I became a runner.

The largest estate jewelry dealer in New York City. I was young, I was hungry, and I was invisible, which is the best thing you can be when you are trying to learn something real. A runner carries. A runner fetches. A runner does not ask questions, does not offer opinions, does not presume to understand what the principals around him understand. So I watched instead. I listened. I absorbed everything.

There is a particular education that only comes from invisibility. The principals spoke freely around me because I was furniture, and furniture hears everything. I learned what a room sounds like when something extraordinary enters it. I learned the difference between the voice someone uses for a client and the voice they use when the door closes. I learned that the most important knowledge in this business is not written anywhere. It lives in the hands and the eyes of the people who have given their lives to it.

I gave mine, starting from the bottom of the room.

The Piece That Changed Everything

At some point, and I cannot tell you the exact moment the shift happened, only that it did, I stopped carrying things and started reading them. The hallmarks. The weight. The particular grammar of a period, a country, a maker's hand. Something had accumulated in me without my knowing it, the way fluency accumulates: gradually, then suddenly.

There was a diamond. Important, with a history long enough and private enough that it is not mine to share, and never will be. It came through the room on a day when my employer was elsewhere. A buyer appeared. The conversation happened. I sold it.

When my employer found out what I had done, a runner, a nobody, closing a significant transaction without permission, without instruction, without anything except instinct and everything I had quietly learned, he had every right to end it there. To show me the door I had originally come through.

Instead, he looked at me for a long moment.

And he took me under his wing.

I have thought about that moment more times than I can count. What he saw in me, I think, was not confidence or audacity. It was recognition. He saw that I had learned to see. And in this business, that is everything.

What followed was an education that no school offers and no credential certifies. I counted stones in micro pavé settings until I understood not just the number but the intention behind each placement, the logic of the setter, the patience required, what it means to do that work without shortcuts. I sat in underground vaults on Madison Avenue and inventoried thousands of pieces, handling objects worth fortunes and objects worth almost nothing, learning that the difference between them was never obvious until you knew what you were looking for. I learned from renowned dealers from every corner of the world, each one with their own language, their own standards, their own particular knowledge accumulated over decades, absorbing what I could from each encounter and adding it to everything that had come before.

You cannot rush that kind of formation. You can only show up, pay attention, and let time do what time does.

What France Gave Me

I am French. And being French, I came with a particular inheritance, a childhood shaped by Strasbourg, a city with one of the longest memories in Europe, a place that has been passed between nations and has learned to hold its own identity through all of it. You grow up in a city like that with a feeling for permanence. For things that survive. For the difference between what is built to last and what is built to sell.

France also gave me a language for objects. The French relationship to beautiful things, to craft, to provenance, to the idea that an object carries the weight of everyone who made it and everyone who loved it, is not sentimental. It is precise. It is demanding. It holds things to a standard.

When I began sourcing in France, quietly, through private channels, the dealer networks and estate connections that run through Lyon and Paris and Bordeaux, the kind of sources that never advertise and never need to, I was not in a foreign country. I was in a conversation I had been prepared for without knowing it. The pieces spoke a language I already knew. The hallmarks, the eagle's head, the owl, the rhinoceros, each one a guarantee pressed into metal by the French state across centuries, felt like punctuation in a sentence I had been reading my whole life.

The Question We Ask Every Piece

But Odeon was never only about France, or Italy, or any single geography. Hugo and I source wherever the pieces are, through private channels and long-cultivated relationships, Italian dealer networks, American estate collections, and places in between that don't fit neatly into any category. The origin is not the filter.

The question we ask of every piece is simpler and harder than that: does it whisper something? Does it carry a past worth continuing? Is there something in it, in the weight, the craft, the story embedded in its making, that insists on being owned, that would be diminished by sitting in a drawer?

Some of our most remarkable pieces are exceptional by any measure, signed, hallmarked, historically significant, the kind of objects that belong in serious collections. Others are more quietly extraordinary: affordable, unsigned, made by hands whose names are lost, but possessed of something that stops you. A particular warmth in the gold. A stone chosen with unusual care. A construction that tells you, without words, that the person who made it was thinking about the person who would one day wear it.

Those pieces deserve to be found too.

Why This, and Not Something Else

I came to jewelry from media, years spent at companies like Havas and Viacom, learning how stories move through the world, how attention is built and held, how the distance between a thing and its perception can be managed with intention. It was good work. I was good at it.

But I missed permanence. I missed objects. I missed the feeling of holding something that had survived a hundred years and would survive a hundred more, something that did not need me to explain it, that made its own argument simply by existing.

The diamond I sold without permission, all those years ago, taught me something I have never forgotten: that the most important thing in this business is not what you own. It is what you can see. The rest, the sourcing trips, the Fifth Avenue address, the pieces that pass through our hands from every corner of the world, is a consequence of that seeing. A life built around it.

I entered this world through a little door. I have never once wanted to leave.