About Hereford Valley | Sterling Silver & Turquoise Jewelry

If you’re looking for a polished story about how I spent years dreaming of opening a jewelry business, carefully developed a business plan, researched the market, and then confidently launched Hereford Valley according to schedule… you are unfortunately in the wrong place.

That is not what happened.

Hereford Valley came together a little more like most things in my life do: I found something I loved, got way too interested in it, started learning everything I possibly could, spent some money I probably could have kept in my bank account, and eventually thought, Well, I guess we’re doing this now.

And here we are.

In my regular life, I work in banking, raise three boys with my husband, help run our first-generation cattle farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and apparently decided somewhere in the middle of all of that that what I really needed was another business?

Because obviously I had too much free time.

Really.. I will do anything to avoid folding the mountain of laundry in this house. 

Hereford Valley specializes in sterling silver jewelry, genuine turquoise and other natural stones, Southwestern-style pieces, and Native American-made jewelry from individual artists. Some pieces are old. Some are new. Some are simple enough to wear every day, and some are the kind of enormous turquoise statement piece that makes absolutely no practical sense and therefore I immediately want it.

But this little corner of the internet is going to be about more than selling jewelry.

The deeper I got into sterling silver and turquoise jewelry, the more I realized how much there is to learn. What does a hallmark actually tell you? What’s the difference between Southwestern-style jewelry and Native-made jewelry? Why does one strand of sterling silver pearls cost dramatically more than another one that looks almost identical in a photo? What does “bench made” mean? Does something have to be stamped .925 to actually be sterling?

And perhaps most importantly: Is this actually turquoise, or have we all been bamboozled?

Those are the kinds of things I want to talk about here.

I am not going to pretend to be the world’s foremost jewelry expert. I’m still learning, and frankly, I hope I always am. But I believe there is value in sharing what you learn along the way, especially in a corner of the jewelry world where craftsmanship, history, terminology, and artist attribution actually matter.

That also means I care about describing pieces honestly. Southwestern-style does not automatically mean Native American-made. “Handmade” can mean different things depending on how a piece was produced. A hallmark can give us clues about who made something, but sometimes researching one feels suspiciously like becoming an unpaid private investigator.

And sometimes the answer is simply: I don’t know.

I’m okay saying that too.

Hereford Valley is ultimately a collection of things I genuinely like. I want the shop to feel a little less like scrolling through an endless catalog and a little more like digging through the good stuff with a friend who suddenly yells, “WAIT. LOOK AT THIS.”

There will be turquoise. There will be sterling silver. There will probably be entirely too many silver pearls. There will be Native-made pieces whose artists and origins deserve to be recognized, alongside beautiful Southwestern-style jewelry made by non-Native artisans. There will be education, questionable financial decisions disguised as inventory purchases, and probably a few things I accidentally decide I can’t sell after they arrive.

Occupational hazard.

Mostly, though, I want Hereford Valley to be a place for people who appreciate jewelry with character. Pieces that feel collected rather than mass-produced. Jewelry you wear for years, beat up a little, pass down, and eventually attach a story to. That’s what I love about this stuff. And that’s what I’m building here.

Welcome to the herd at Hereford Valley.

Things may get a little unsupervised.