Jermaine Edwards
Lannaman Gems - What the Material Wants to Become
Waste to Beauty
I grew up in Bartons, St. Catherine, and the image that lives most vividly in me is of my father at work.
I would come home from school and there he would be, hands moving over gemstone beads, coconut shells, bamboo, seeds, turning them into jewellery and art with a patience I didn’t yet have words for. What struck me most was what he was starting with. These were not precious materials by anyone’s conventional measure. They were things that grew wild, things people walked past, things that might otherwise be discarded. And he would take them in his hands and make them into something you could not look away from.
Waste to beauty, right in front of me, every afternoon. That transformation planted the seed for everything.
The Voice Inside the Material
I did not get pulled into this world through magazines or fashion weeks. I got pulled in by watching.
My father taught me something before he ever taught me a technique: that materials have a voice if you are patient enough to listen. The bamboo wants to become something. The shell already knows what it is. The work is in the listening, the patience, the willingness to follow where the material leads rather than forcing it into a shape it was never meant to hold.
I knew I had to build a brand around this the moment I saw how people responded to it. They were not just responding to an accessory. They were responding to meaning. To roots. To the proof that Jamaican craft, made from Jamaican earth, could stand beside anything in the world and hold its own. That response told me something I needed to hear: the story I was telling mattered, and there were people waiting to receive it.
Rooted in Bartons, Made for Everywhere
Jamaican summer is not a mood. It is a movement: beach to dancehall to cookout, sometimes all in the same day.
A piece that can’t survive that, that can’t breathe and move and hold its own under the sun and under the lights, has no business being worn here. Our culture is bold, social, rhythmic, and the materials I work with carry all of that. The weight of bamboo. The shine of a coconut shell. The way a piece settles on your body when you’re dancing or leaning against a wall telling story. These things are not accidental. They come from growing up inside the culture that made them meaningful.
But Jamaicans move globally, and when we move, we take that energy with us. My designs have to travel the same way. Rooted in Bartons, but made for London, New York, Toronto. The person wearing the piece might be thousands of miles from the island, but the island should be present in what they’re wearing.
I see the brand sitting alongside houses that treat craft as luxury: the technical rigour of Bottega Veneta, the material conscience of Stella McCartney, the cultural honesty of Brother Vellies, turning indigenous craft into global fashion without apologising for where it came from. Heritage craft, sustainable luxury, cultural storytelling. Luxury is not the logo. It is the transformation.
The Sound of the Work
When I walk into the studio and the day opens up with no interruptions, the first thing I do is touch the materials.
I feel what the coconut wants to become that day, what the bamboo is asking for. Then the sounds take over: sandpaper, drill, seeds clicking in bowls. Hours disappear in a way that only happens when you are exactly where you are supposed to be. I am not thinking about deadlines or orders or anything beyond the next cut, the next polish, the next decision in front of me. By late afternoon the bench is covered in shavings and there is a row of finished pieces that did not exist that morning.
That is what flow feels like. There is nothing else quite like it.
Teaching People to Look Again
The hardest thing I have had to push through is the assumption.
Natural materials, early on, were too easily lumped in with cheap souvenirs. Coconut and bamboo carried an association in people’s minds that had nothing to do with craft and everything to do with what they had seen sold cheaply at roadside stalls. Getting people to see premium in those same materials required patience and a clear-eyed strategy.
I stopped arguing against the assumption and started showing the work itself. The hours behind each piece. The finish. The refinement that comes from treating a natural material with the same seriousness that any luxury house gives to leather or gold. I put the work in spaces where people expect quality and let it sit there and speak. Once someone actually holds one of the pieces, the assumption breaks. It always breaks. Because what they are holding does not feel like anything they expected, and that gap between expectation and reality is where the real conversation begins.
Story Over Logo
When I sketch something new, I picture two people.
The first is the style icon, the one who knows how to make a statement without opening their mouth. The second is the everyday Jamaican who wants to wear pride, who wants to leave the house carrying something that means something. At the centre of both is the same person: the one who values story over logo, who wants to put something on and feel connected to where it came from.
For the person in the Diaspora who has not stepped foot on the island in years, I want that connection to happen the moment the piece is in their hands. That mix of pride and memory. The smell of the sea, the sound of music drifting somewhere, the warmth that this island carries even in its quietest moments. I want them to feel seen, and to have something on their body that tells their story even when they are miles and miles from home.
Still Made With Jamaican Hands
Things Jamaican put the work in front of people who already understood the value of Jamaican craft. That platform changed the trajectory in ways that momentum alone could not have: more eyes, more trust, the kind of credibility that lets a brand grow without compromising the thing that made it worth building in the first place.
Five years from now, success looks like a Jamaican brand recognized globally for what it actually is: natural materials elevated to luxury, stocked in the right spaces, worn by people who understand what they are holding, and still made with Jamaican hands. That last part is not a detail. It is the whole point.
To the young Jamaican designer who is afraid to start: start anyway. Do not wait for perfect conditions, because they are not coming. Use what you have. Tell your story. Let the work speak. The world genuinely needs your specific point of view, and no version of you is more ready than the one standing here right now.
Lannaman Gems available at Things Jamaican.
