Staff photo
Allison Morgan adjusts a ring display at the Charlotte Allison design studio in English Village.
Charlotte Allison, a jewelry business owned by Elizabeth Read and her mother, Allison Morgan, started eight years ago with just a few ring designs.
Now, the mother-daughter duo has a design studio in English Village filled with necklaces, earrings, bracelets and rings from all across the color spectrum.
It seems fitting that this family-owned, family-named business began with a pregnancy announcement.
Read and Morgan were in the car driving to the airport, heading to Bangkok to meet with stone vendors and manufacturers to see if this new business venture was possible.
“It’s a good thing that your children are two years apart,” Morgan said that day to Read, who had just given birth six months ago. “The last thing you want to have is more than two children in college at the same time.”
“Mom, I think I should tell you something,” Read replied.
Read was a few weeks pregnant and sick the entire time in Bangkok, but for Morgan, the trip was like opening a door into the past. Morgan had a design shop in Mountain Brook Village in the 1980s called Allison’s Custom Jewelry. She had always said she wanted to get back in the business; she just didn’t know when she would.
The trip to Bangkok made them hungry to take the next step.
“Mom and I talked about it, and she said, ‘I think I really am going to do this,’” Read said. “And I believed in what she was doing.”
They spent the next four-and-a-half years in development. Read stepped down from her job to work with her mother, focusing on sales and marketing. They decided to name the business after Morgan, whose first name is Charlotte. It’s also a name shared by other members of their family.
At first, Morgan opposed having the business named after her.
“But it was such a beautiful name,” Read said. “It’s such a tradition within our family. Now, I can’t imagine it being anything else.”
Read remembers the early days of Charlotte Allison, trying to make business calls over the sound of her newborn baby crying while they were working out of Morgan’s house.
“She was so afraid people would hear the baby cry or the dog bark or the doorbell ring,” Morgan said. “I said, ‘Honey, it doesn’t matter.’”
The pair quickly learned they complement each other. Read said her mother doesn’t like tedious tasks or to be slowed down, so drawing something with a lot of detail makes Morgan feel bored. As a result, she started asking Read to draw the designs.
“The benefit of that was I had no classical training, so anything was possible in my mind,” Read said. “But she had the training, the knowledge and the expertise to tell me what was really doable.”
The architecture of a ring has to be incredibly precise, Morgan said. Being off by one-quarter of a millimeter could make the center stone rattle.
“She would draw these things, and I would go, ‘Let me explain to you how this is not going to work,’” Morgan said.
They compare it to baking a cake. Read bakes the cake, and Morgan helps her ice it. One of Read’s favorite things about what she does, she said, is helping customers complete a collection.
“People might have certain pieces in their collection that they’ve been given over the years, and then they want to know, ‘What am I missing?’” she said. “Doing that in a way that makes sense and tells their story with their personality — that’s been so much fun.”
For Morgan, sharing beauty with others makes the job enjoyable.
“They come through that door because they want to buy beauty,” she said. “They want to celebrate something, they want to commemorate something, or they want to give a gift. It’s just a joy to be able to participate in that experience.”
Although a placard on Morgan’s desk reads, “I am the boss,” she said her daughter is competent, gifted and a pleasure to work with.
“We have a lot of fun,” Read said. “We’re very different, but we have the same goal. At the end of the day, we both value our relationship as mother and daughter more than any other aspect of the business.”
The pieces in Charlotte Allison’s collection are set in 14-karat gold and work with “any stone someone could imagine,” Morgan said.
The design studio, which they moved into in October, is located at 2106 Cahaba Road in English Village. People can drop in or make appointments.
Visit charlotteeallison.com for more information.
