Our earliest pieces were made from 925 sterling silver with 18k gold vermeil plating. It's a beautiful material with a long history in fine jewellery, and there's nothing wrong with it, it's still exactly the right choice for a lot of jewellery, just not for what we realised we were actually building. Here's what changed, and why.

What we kept hearing

The more we listened to how our customers actually wore their earrings, the clearer a pattern got: our girls didn't want an "occasion" pair. They wanted the pair they reached for every single day: to the gym, in the shower, through a full day at work, without a second thought about when to put it on or when it was safe to take off.

Sterling silver and vermeil are genuinely gorgeous, but they're built for a different rhythm. The kind of jewellery you put on for something, then take off and store carefully afterwards. That's a lovely way to wear jewellery. It just wasn't the way our customers were telling us they wanted to wear theirs.

We wanted to stop asking people to save things

There's something we didn't love about the instructions that came with our earliest pieces: take these off before you shower, keep them away from the gym, be careful with perfume. Not because silver and vermeil are lesser materials, they're not, but because every one of those instructions was, in a small way, asking someone to save their earrings for the right moment instead of just living in them.

That sat at odds with what we actually wanted East & Essex to stand for. "Never skip earrings" doesn't really work if the earrings themselves are asking to be skipped on gym days, or left at home before a swim.

Why 316L stainless steel fit what we were actually building

316L surgical-grade stainless steel is the material used in medical implants and marine hardware built for constant contact with skin and water as a baseline, not an exception. It's genuinely hypoallergenic, holds up to sweat and water without tarnishing, and doesn't need a careful storage routine to stay looking the way it did on day one.

Switching to it meant we could stop writing "take these off before" into our care instructions altogether which, more than anything, is what made it feel like the right material for what we were actually trying to make: earrings built for every part of your day, not just the planned ones.

What this meant in practice

It wasn't a quiet swap. Moving the whole collection to 316L meant reworking designs, testing weight and finish differently, and being upfront with our community about what was changing and why some of that transition is still visible in older listings and pages we're actively updating. But it's the material that actually matches the promise we wanted to make from the start: earrings you live in, not earrings you save.