Our Story

My husband Morgan was a young police officer walking his beat downtown when we met.

He doesn't like me starting the story there. He says it makes him sound like he was always looking for trouble.

But it's the truth. It was the winter of 1966, and every morning I walked past the little shops on my way to work. For three months, he was the young officer I'd see on the corner, always with his hat neatly in place and a kind word for just about everyone. Then one morning, the clasp on my bracelet broke on the sidewalk, right in front of him. The little chain and charms scattered across the pavement. He stopped, helped me gather every last piece, and walked me to a nearby shop so I could have it repaired. Before we parted, he asked me to dinner. Two years later I married him, and my mother said it was either the most romantic thing she'd ever heard or the cleverest way a policeman had ever found an excuse to ask a woman out.

We still argue about which one she meant.

That morning, something happened to me too. As I looked at my broken bracelet, I couldn't stop thinking about how much a small thing you wear can mean. How a piece of jewelry can hold a memory, a person, a whole moment in your life. In the evenings I started sketching jewelry at the kitchen table. Bracelets, necklaces, earrings. Simple, quiet pieces, the kind a woman can wear every day for the rest of her life.

Morgan always encouraged me. He wasn't a jeweler, but he believed in what I was trying to create. He helped me build my first little workbench and would sit beside me while I worked, listening to my ideas and patiently looking at every new design.

He'd look at my drawings and say, "Make that one."

So I did.

In 1971 I rented a narrow little space with a workbench by the window, just like the little shops downtown where we'd first met. Over the door I put my name. And beside it, his. Because without that broken bracelet and the kind young police officer who stopped to help me, I might never have started. Morgan & Miller.

I signed the lease the same afternoon I saw the place.

Since then I have made jewelry by hand for the women of our town and far beyond. Weddings and anniversaries and ordinary Tuesdays. Daughters who came back years later with their own daughters. Women who sat across the counter and told me things they said they'd never told anyone.

I still go to the bench every morning. Morgan sits beside me with his coffee and tells me I'm filing too hard. My hands are slower now. He tells me it's time to rest.

I tell him I'll stop when I stop enjoying it.

I haven't stopped yet.

For fifty-five years, the only way to own something I made was to walk through my door. Women kept asking me to go online. I kept saying no. Then my grandson sat me down in front of his laptop and asked, very patiently, how many more women I wanted to turn away.

I finally said yes.

Every piece here is made by hand, one at a time, the same way I've always made them. And every piece still carries my stamp inside the clasp.

— Margaret Miller  
Founder, Morgan & Miller — Since 1971