Origin
The Things
We Carry
My mother always wore a golden ring on her right hand. When I was a little girl, she taught me to spin the ring and pause for a prayer each time my finger reached one of the seven gilded knots along its band. The practice is called japa: the meditative repetition of a mantra, a way of returning to presence through ritual.
The ring came from the ashram in Ganeshpuri, India, where I visited as a child, learning sacred chants and ancient stories. When I first moved away from home, my mother gave it to me as a way to hold something familiar and eternal—a reminder of the threads that connect us to one another.
POE takes its name from my mother, whose ring remains a touchstone for the work. Born from this inheritance, the collection is a way of honoring what passes between generations. Both her name and her ring are reminders that what we inherit can hold meaning far beyond its material form—that the things we carry are, in their own way, a way of carrying one another.
Biography
A Life in
Art & Ritual
Artist and designer Danielle Birrittella began creating jewelry from objects collected along her travels as a classical singer and performer.
Born on a Hindu ashram to American parents and raised across Hindu, Catholic, and Jewish traditions, Birrittella draws from a unique intersection of Eastern mysticism and Western minimalism. Her work invites the wearer to look beyond adornment for beauty’s sake and explore the deeper connections between alchemy, ritual, and the sacred.
After studying music and theatre at NYU and earning an MFA from CalArts, Birrittella became fascinated by the design traditions of India and the Mediterranean. She began researching cultural rites of adornment and working with master jewelers to create one-of-a-kind pieces.
POE emerged from this evolving artistic practice: a jewelry house rooted in the sculptural language of gold, ancient symbolism, and the personal histories held within objects. The Japa and Sacred Geometry collections honor the spiritual traditions that shaped her upbringing, while the Constellation Collection draws on the celestial world her father, a trained astrologer, introduced to her as a child.
Through POE, Birrittella continues to explore the space where art, ritual, and personal meaning converge.
Meaning
The Inner Life
of Objects
Alongside her artistic practice, Danielle is a psychotherapist whose work explores the relationship between the conscious and unconscious, the stories we inherit, and the symbols through which we make sense of our lives.
This sensibility finds a natural expression in POE. Across cultures and throughout history, adornment has served purposes beyond decoration: as protection, ritual, remembrance, and a means of expressing what words cannot always convey.
Danielle is drawn to this more intimate dimension of jewelry—the personal mythology that develops around an object, the memories it comes to hold, and the meaning it gathers over time. A piece might evoke a person, commemorate a passage, or serve as a talisman.
For her, the most compelling jewelry exists at the intersection of the tangible and intangible: something beautiful to behold, but even more meaningful to carry.
Craft
An Heirloom
in the Making
POE pieces are conceived as small works of art: sculptural expressions that draw on the natural world, ancient symbolism, and the enduring beauty of precious materials.
Danielle studied alongside master jewelers and gained an appreciation for traditional techniques. She creates distinctive pieces in gold, with an emphasis on the details that give each creation its character.
The collections move between the organic and the architectural, the ancient and the contemporary, the understated and the unexpected. Each piece is an invitation to engage with adornment in a more personal way—not simply as something to wear, but as something to live with.
Ultimately, POE is about creating jewelry that becomes part of a person’s story. Pieces to be collected, cherished, imbued with memory, and passed down—gathering new meaning with each generation.