For 36 years, Brendan Sherwood has turned conversations into custom creations at Elements
There's a story Brendan Sherwood tells about glass vessels he made in college. During a critique, his instructor posed a hypothetical: What if someone puts something inside that ruins the aesthetic, that destroys what you've created?
Brendan's answer? "I don't care. I served my purpose. I made the object. It’s complete."
The response might sound cavalier if you didn't understand what he really means: I've had my experience with this piece. Now it's your turn.
For thirty-six years, that philosophy has powered Elements Custom Jewelry Studio in downtown Royal Oak. And it's why, when you walk into Elements, you're not walking into a jewelry store. You're walking into a conversation.
Brendan didn't set out to revolutionize custom jewelry in Royal Oak. He was just a high school kid who liked making things. But by his senior year, he'd already landed a co-op job at a jewelry store doing custom work.
At Detroit’s famed CCS, he studied sculpture: glass and metal smithing. When jewelry assignments came in, he'd turn in sculptures and call them "environmental jewelry."
The other students weren't amused.
"They were all up in arms," Brendan recalls. "And I said, 'Well, it's environmental jewelry. Why can't I do that? I'm here in art school and I'm supposed to limit myself? Give me the assignment. Let me go explore. Let me fall on my face.’"
Fresh out of CCS, Brendan opened Elements' first location on Washington Street in Royal Oak. In 1994, he moved Elements to its current spot: not on Main Street, not on Washington, but tucked in the center of town. Friends asked why he wouldn't choose a prime location.
"I'm like, 'Well, I've got parking,'" Brendan says with a smile.
That first year in the new location, his business increased forty percent.
Brendan believes it’s because Elements is a destination. And maybe it’s a destination because he doesn’t put the burden of creating on his clients.
"Years ago, my accountant said, 'Ask me any question and I'll be happy to answer it,'" Brendan recalls. "I thought, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard. I don't have the questions. I need you to show me how this should work."
That's how Brendan approaches jewelry. When someone comes in to buy jewelry for a partner, he asks: What are they like? What colors do they wear? Are they conservative or eclectic? Symmetrical or asymmetrical?
For custom pieces, the questions get more candid. Do you truly like the diamond? Or are you just keeping it because it was Grandma's?
"We're not here selling jewelry," Brendan says. "We're here providing a service."
The service is listening, and asking clients the right questions until they know what they actually want. Clients say the same thing so often it's become the studio's unofficial tagline: "Thank you for listening to me.”
But Brendan doesn’t just listen. Elements has a showcase devoted entirely to stones: dozens of them, in every color and character, from familiar to extraordinary. It’s part of how he educates clients on the different purposes each stone can serve. When they see and touch, they understand.
“These things are like fingerprints,” he says. And that’s always his goal: to find something that fits your fingerprint, not just your finger.
Over the years, Brendan has learned that not everyone recognizes the right piece for them immediately. Sometimes a stone catches someone’s attention, but the timing isn’t right. The decision doesn’t land. The idea lingers.
So, often, Brendan designs pieces even when client don't commit, because the vision is complete inhis mind. He’s had customers the creations were meant for eventually return, see the finished work in his showcase, and simply know.
Sometimes the perfect piece has to exist in the world before you recognize it as yours.
Brendan doesn’t just bring perfect pieces to life; he also stands behind them. When jewelry he created years earlier returns to his studio—sometimes for repair, sometimes simply for care—he approaches it with the same responsibility he had when he was making it. If something isn’t right, he makes it right. Not out of obligation, but out of principle.
"I've got to live with myself," he says.
That commitment to craft is why Elements builds lifelong relationships with their clients.
Angie Yaldoo, owner of Youngblood’s Barber Shop in Hazel Park, says she was “amazed at how Brendan created something so intentional and so me,” using only info Brendan got from Angie’s husband Lyle.
Amanda Wahl, a former parks and rec commissioner in Pleasant Ridge, said Brendan “listens” (there’s that word again) “and turns your ideas into beautiful reality.” A week after her father passed, Amanda came in to ask Brendan if he could turn some diamond studs Dad had given her into earrings. “Brendan was so kind,” she remembers, “and the earrings he created are so beautiful and hold such special meaning.”
Speaking of meaning, Brendan tells me about a couple who moved to Texas years ago. They recently stopped by with their three kids, so the father could explain how precious the jewelry Brendan created for their mother is to them both.
"That was pretty meaningful," Brendan says quietly.
People from out of state order engagement rings because their parents worked with Brendan decades ago. And the jeweler who hired Brendan in high school is now retiring—and sending Brendan all his clients. All that is meaningful too.
What else is meaningful at Elements? The process. The conversation. The moment when someone relaxes because they realize you're not trying to sell them anything; you’re just trying to help.
"Here, put that on," Brendan tells clients when they're trying on pieces. "If you can't touch it, can't feel it, don't feel comfortable with it, why would you want to buy it?"
It's a philosophy that extends to everything: Don't treat jewelry like it's too precious to interact with. And once it’s moved on to its purpose, let go: simply be its custodian.
Brendan makes something. Has his experience with it. And releases it into the world—where it becomes a part of your story.
Elements Custom Jewelry Studio | 512 S. Center Street, Royal Oak | (248) 544-4111 | elementsjewelrystudio.com
"We're not here selling jewelry. We're here providing a service."
"I tell clients, 'Here, put that on.' If you can't touch it, can't feel it, don't feel comfortable with it, why would you want to buy it?"