ShehNoor is named after my grandmothers, Shehnaaz and Noor.
I wish I could tell you that I had some grand plan when I started it. I didn't. I was 22, had PKR 12,500 to my name for the business, and an unreasonable amount of opinions about jewellery.
The name came easily. Sheh from Shehnaaz. Noor from Rehmat Noor.
The rest took a little longer.
I grew up watching these two women wear jewellery in completely different ways. There was always something on... bangles pushed up the arm, earrings that made an outfit, a necklace brought out for a wedding.
Jewellery was never the thing you bought and put away.
It lived with you.
It was taken out, worn, taken apart, changed, added to. A stone would be replaced. A necklace would become shorter. Something old would suddenly look completely different with something new. There was always a little bit of more.
I think I absorbed all of that before I knew I was paying attention.
So when I started designing jewellery, I wasn't really interested in making things that looked 'traditional' for the sake of looking traditional. I wanted the feeling I remembered.
Old ideas, but not old-fashioned.
That's still probably the simplest way I know how to explain ShehNoor.
I design the things I want to see women actually wearing. Jewellery with enough personality to change an outfit, but not so much that it has to wait for a special occasion. Pieces that can become part of someone's own collection... worn, mixed, repeated, borrowed, given away and, hopefully, one day passed on.
Would Dadi Shehnaaz or Nani Noor have reached for this?
Not because I think they would have worn everything exactly as I design it. They wouldn't have. They had their own taste, their own favourites, their own very strong opinions.
That's the point.
ShehNoor isn't about recreating what my grandmothers wore.
It's about carrying forward the instinct they had for jewellery — and seeing where I can take it.
The jewellery itself is made with karigars in Lahore and Karachi, many of whom have spent years learning techniques that aren't written down anywhere. They learn by watching, doing, correcting and doing it again.
I've spent the last seven years learning in much the same way.
ShehNoor started small. For a long time, it was mostly me and one other person figuring things out as we went. There were orders packed on floors, ideas that didn't work, pieces that looked much better in my head, and quite a few lessons I would have preferred to learn the easier way.
It's grown since then. The team has grown. The jewellery has grown. The things I want ShehNoor to become have definitely grown.
But the reason I started it hasn't changed much.
I still want women to have jewellery they are excited to wear.
The kind you find yourself reaching for even when there was no particular reason to dress up.
The kind that makes you look at yourself in the mirror once more before you leave.
The kind you might eventually find in someone else's jewellery box, years from now, and know exactly where it came from.
Maybe that's the best thing my grandmothers gave me.
Not a particular necklace or a particular way of wearing jewellery.
Just the understanding that some things are too lovely to keep in a box.
— Anusheh
