One letter,
worn every day

MONOZO began in 2017 with a single disc bracelet and a clasp that gave up in a week. The letter was the easy part. Holding it on a wrist through washing up, coat sleeves and a night of sleep turned out to be the whole job, and it took us three tries to get a chain that survived it.

That is still the brief. A piece here is thin on purpose, because nobody wears a heavy initial twice, and thin is where jewellery usually fails. So we buy on the parts that break: the jump ring at the disc, the spring in the clasp, the finish at the point where a chain folds over itself.

The MONOZO range now runs to 79 pieces. Most of them are initial bracelets, 61 of them, which is what happens when people ask for their own letter and then for their mother's. Around them sit letter necklaces with a sunflower, crosses that hang upright, and crosses that lie sideways along the chain.

Two tones cover the whole catalogue. Gold tone is 54 pieces and silver tone is 25, and both are a plated surface over a base metal rather than solid metal. The MONOZO workshop states 14K and 18K for the plating and calls the pieces hypoallergenic, nickel free and lead free; those are the maker's words, and we print them as the maker's words.

What plating does not do is last forever. A surface layer wears at the points that rub, which on a bracelet means the disc and the clasp, and on a necklace means the back of the chain. Perfume, chlorine and a hot shower take it off faster. We say so on the care page rather than in a footnote, because it changes how you buy: at these prices a piece is a season or several, not an heirloom.

Sizes stay deliberately narrow. Bracelets are 6+2 inches, which fits most adult wrists with the extension taken up, and the necklaces are 18+2.5 inches. There is no chart to read and no size to get wrong, which is the reason a letter makes such a good gift: you need the initial and nothing else.

Who buys what has a pattern we can read off the ratings. Single letters go to the person wearing them. Pairs go to sisters and to mothers, usually the same two letters twice. The crosses go to confirmations and to people who want the chain without the initial, and they are the only part of the range that sells to men.

The letter itself is the one thing we do not customise. Every piece here is stamped before it reaches us, so a letter is either in stock or it is not, and the index has a gap at Y this week. A brand that engraves to order would tell you otherwise. MONOZO does not engrave, it stocks, and the difference shows up as an empty square in the index rather than as a longer wait.

Prices and stock move on the retail side, so this catalogue keeps to what we can state honestly: the letter, the tone, the plating the maker declares, the chain length, the pouch, and the rating buyers left. Everything else you check at the counter before you pay.