Anna was always drawn to creating and decided to pursue it at university. For six years, she studied at Prague’s Academy of Art, Architecture and Design, where she created her first collections and became fascinated with the symbolism that jewels could carry. “Such a small object that can express such immense things,” she shared. This set the theme for her moving forward, and in the years to come, she exhibited her craft at design fairs around the world, from London to New York.
As a goldsmith and silversmith, Anna often draws inspiration from themes near and dear to her. “All of the jewels I create relate to something I’m fond of—and it then turns out other people like it too.“ For example, being a coffee aficionado who used to work at a coffee shop, she founded a jewellery line featuring golden coffee beans. And since Anna has always had a positive relationship with cycling and even has about 25 Czech triathlons and one Iron Man under her belt, she inevitably included some cycling-themed pieces. “I liked the contrast of the subtlety when creating jewellery and the intensity of riding a bike in triathlons,” she adds on how jewellery making and sports go together.
Her studio is famous for various casting and imprinting techniques, mainly in connection with custom wedding rings. Anna once added cycling to the mix upon request from a couple to be married and came up with something ingenious. “I scanned various bike tyre treads in 3D, scaled them down, and transferred them onto custom rings. Then I added tiny black diamonds, which represent all the ‘debris’ and little stones that get stuck in a tyre’s tread along the journey, here as a metaphor—a life’s ride together.”
Getting back to crafting unique bracelets from the chain of the 2024 Škoda Green Jersey champion, Biniam Girmay, Anna was excited when the proposal was presented to her. “I was happy that yet another beautiful and meaningful project with a captivating background story reached me. That’s what I enjoy the most.”
When she contemplated how to transfer Biniam’s winning story onto the resulting pieces, she started playing around with several concepts. “Each link in the chain made countless loops to help Biniam win. I wanted to express the authenticity and truthfulness of the object with simplicity. In the end, I decided to use and polish the actual segments of the chain, engrave them with their specific number in the limited series, and put them on an Emerald Green nylon thread, to represent the jersey’s colour.”
Speaking about limited series, each chain link is engraved as ‘x/112’, with x standing for the serial number and 112 representing the legendary digit known to all cyclists: the number of chain links in a chain.
We thank Anna Steinerová for her time and for showing us around her studio, and fingers crossed for anyone entering our contest!
