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Sometimes when you go back to the place where it all started, you begin to see your life through a completely different lens. The places you couldn't wait to leave can look different after you've spent years becoming yourself somewhere else. Coming back to New Jersey after so much time away has given me plenty to think about.
At 18 years old, there was nothing I wanted more than to leave New Jersey and see the world. I wanted to move west, travel and figure out what I wanted my creative life to look like. I didn't know exactly where I was headed or how any of it would work out, but my gut told me to go, so I did.
San Francisco became the place where I really found myself. I arrived young and with barely $300 in my pocket, and I certainly couldn't have imagined that I would eventually build a life and a jewelry business there. The Bay Area's creative community gave me room to experiment, take risks and slowly develop a point of view that felt like my own.
Those years shaped both me and CMD. I learned how to turn ideas into objects, how to build a business around creative work and, perhaps most importantly, how much I loved making jewelry that people could actually incorporate into their lives.
When I eventually made the move back from San Francisco to Asbury Park, I found myself unpacking boxes in the basement of my new home. Buried inside were sketches and spec books filled with designs from years earlier, including some of the pieces that helped me launch my jewelry career.
Looking through them felt a little like opening a time capsule. There were ideas I still loved immediately and others that clearly belonged to a younger version of me. I started wondering what would happen if I took some of those original designs and approached them with everything I'd learned since.
I didn't want to simply reproduce the old pieces. I wanted to keep what made them interesting while refining the proportions, forms and details so they felt connected to the designer I had become.
That process became the Full Circle Collection, a group of some of my earliest ideas reworked through the lens of CMD today. If you've been following my work since the early San Francisco years, a few of these pieces might feel familiar, but they're more refined and much more at home alongside the jewelry we're making now.
Revisiting old work is a strange and wonderful design exercise because you can see both how much you've changed and the things you've been drawn to all along. Working with Sam, my Product Development Pro, gave me the chance to take those early ideas apart, reconsider them and bring the strongest ones forward.
In some ways, that's exactly what design has always been for me. An idea doesn't necessarily stop being interesting because you've moved beyond its first version. Sometimes you just need enough distance to see what it was trying to become.
There's something pretty wild about realizing how literally my life has come full circle. If someone had told 18-year-old me that I would eventually live just a stone's throw from where I grew up, after nearly two decades of building a life on the other side of the country, I never would have believed them.
But returning isn't the same thing as going backward. I came home with a business, decades of experience, a completely different perspective and a much clearer understanding of the kind of life I wanted to build. Asbury Park gave me the opportunity to reconnect with where I came from without giving up everything I'd become along the way.
My home is close to The CMD Shop & Studio, the Atlantic Ocean is just down the road and I'm surrounded by a creative community that continues to influence both my life and my work. CMD has evolved plenty since those first years in San Francisco, and I know it will keep evolving from here.
Maybe that's what I love most about the idea of coming full circle. You can return to where you started without ever becoming the person you were when you left.
To taking the long way home,
Colleen
© Colleen Mauer Designs. All rights reserved.
Published: September 7, 2022
Updated: August 21, 2026
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