When you first come to L.A., the freeway won’t be the first thing you notice, for a very simple reason: you’re already driving it. How can you truly notice something that you spend so much time smack in the middle of?

An early design for the L.A. Freeway necklace

How often do we get a true bird’s eye view of the city we live in? How do we see L.A. when it has such a sprawling, morphous identity as a place? Dorothy Parker’s famous indictment of L.A. as “nineteen suburbs in search of a city” holds even truer today, as the city continues to sprawl outward, spilling, eventually, into the sea.

How can we grasp something so infinite, so ever-changing, so impossible as the city we live in?

Only by looking at it from a different angle.

What started as just another notebook doodle came to life in only eight months. Getting into the creative mindset that sparked this journey is easy: Combine a limitless sense of invention with the way you’re supposed to feel on the freeway. Ideally, you’d been ripping across the PCH in a convertible listening to the Beach Boys with the wind streaming through your hair, wondering where all your cares went.

The reality of the freeway is, for most of us, quite different. We sit in too-hot or too-cold cars listening to droning podcasts and trying to beat the traffic.

But the fantasy of Los Angeles is part of this. You want to get where you’re going quickly, but you don’t realize that the waiting part, the sitting-around-in-traffic part, is part of it. It’s just as much a part of the city’s identity as Venice Beach and the Hollywood Sign. There’s a lot of waiting in L.A. Everybody’s waiting to get famous, or to get greenlit, or to strike it rich. Nobody’s thinking about the waiting.

The Freeway necklace isn’t just a reminder of how L.A. works. It’s a reminder of how it looks from above. When we don’t have the perspective we need, it’s hard to think about the journey as something worthwhile. When faced with a sense of how things look from a great height, however, we can see where everything begins and ends. We can see the forest for the trees. We continue on our way, knowing there’s a path forward.

The L.A. Freeway necklace is hot off the presses and we couldn’t wait to share it with you. Our necklace was conceptualized in 3D and handmade in Downtown Los Angeles in a limited edition of six.