Swoboda vintage jewellery
Swoboda vintage jewellery
Edward Swoboda (1917–2013) created his company in 1956 in Los Angeles and called it by his name. He sold his jewelry at Saks Fifth Avenue, Harrods of London, Neiman Marcus, and featured in showrooms in Los Angeles, New York, and Dallas. Once, Nancy Reagan commissioned Edward Swoboda to make his fabulous gemstone trees as gifts to governors. Besides, he was a favorite jewelry designer of many Hollywood stars.
Meanwhile, Edward and his wife often traveled to South America. From there he organized a continuous supply of semi-precious stones for his jewelry lines. Edward was a talented designer, and his education gave him the opportunity to understand perfectly the stones, that’s why the company was gaining momentum. In his collections Swoboda used freshwater pearls, gold leaf, a variety of semi-precious stones and unique design. This has always distinguished decorations by Swoboda, despite the fact that jewelry was not marked on the metal stigma until 1966. The product generally contained the company’s name on the cardboard tag of jewelry.
Edward Swoboda was born 30 November 1917 in Oakland, California. His father, Henry Swoboda, was a telephone engineer for the Central Oil Company. His mother, Wilma, was a storekeeper. Before he was a teenager, the collecting instinct had kicked in and he was always after his father to take him on field trips to collect minerals.
Swoboda vintage jewellery
Although the business at the LaPeer Drive location in Beverly Hills was successful for many years, the most successful of all was the hiring of two sisters from Korea. One of them – Kum Ja, became his wife. The couple lived happily together forty-eight years. Edward and Kum had two children, Bryan and Sumiya, and four grandchildren, who later became interested in minerals.
