BB Spotlight | Wolf Circus

BB Spotlights feature Edmonton individuals that intrigue, inspire, and interest us and will be published throughout the year. Photography by BB Collective. Written by Karen Fraser.

When Fiona Morrison wore a ring with a wolf head on it, she would start conversations boldly and effortlessly. Or, rather, the ring would start conversations for her, garnering compliments for its uniqueness and for being an animal other than a bird. A student in entrepreneurship at the University of Victoria at the time, she noted the kinds of things that girls liked about the ring and created her own jewelry line, Wolf Circus.

“At first it was definitely just me finding objects to put on chains and then sell to my friends. That was the goal, you know?” Fiona sits across from me in her studio, located in Vancouver’s Chinatown, the sunlight creating shapes on the floor. We had a little bit of difficulty finding her space, walking up and down the sidewalk a few times before calling Fiona and having her come down to meet us. She lets an infectious laugh echo in the stairwell as she leads us up to the third floor where her studio neighbours those of other artists. 

“Some people think I’m in the middle of nowhere, but I’m like, no, it’s a cool area!” As I find out later, she’s in the middle of a group of cool, creative people working from that Keefer Street building: there are two other female designers next to her doing a lot of custom jewelry work, and Wolf Circus earrings are soldered by someone on the same floor. Having started her business doing everything from the initial sketches to the jewelry casting to the marketing, Fiona now takes every opportunity to hire her friends. As we talk, I notice her sentences are peppered with “my girls” and “our buds,” and I comment that it’s apparent she likes supporting others through her business. 

“Yeah, so that’s another thing I end up doing, is I end up hiring my friends or giving my friends jobs,” she says before mentioning her friend and photographer Berkley. “It’s pretty fun to support them and just grow off each other as well – she’s been my photographer forever – so it’s really awesome to just kind of both build up our brands together.”

Starting Wolf Circus while in school and working part-time at a small boutique, Fiona noticed a gap in the market for, as she writes on her website, jewelry for the bold, beautiful, brainy and badass. 

“It was all very pretty, like beautiful little lockets and hearts, and I was more of a spike kind of girl.” Putting objects on chains and wiring up crystals for all her buds at school soon gave way to tailoring a line for a more mature customer base and rethinking her design techniques. One major source of inspiration has been seeing how her jewelry interacts with the personal styles of those who wear it. I ask whether Fiona finds that the women who wear her jewelry share a common style, and she’s quick to tell me that’s not the case. She recounts part of the evolution of her brand as a mirror to her own growth from jewelry maker to creative director.

“When you’re marketing a brand, you always have to think of your girl and what she looks like and what she wears and where she shops, but then it never happens that way! I want to say our girl maybe shops at Aritzia and wears this and wears that, but then it’s never like that; it’s always so many different levels of girls who wear tons of really cool vintage pieces, or girls who love our line because they love that we stand for being a little bit more badass and they’re just really into that kind of stuff.”

Finding common ground in Wolf Circus jewelry isn’t hard to do. The day I’m interviewing her, the studio is studded with beautiful earrings, rings, bracelets, and necklaces lying on every surface and hanging from the walls from a sample sale held the weekend before. Fiona gets up and walks over to one of the tables, her nude mules clacking on the wood floor. She returns with a ring in her hand; it has two bands and a bar placed on top at a right angle, one stone at either end.

“One of my favourite pieces this season is called the Zane ring. I wanted to incorporate some stones, but to me stones are so feminine, like a little bit more girly, but I wanted to make them a little bit more unique by making them two different colours of black. And then just totally random colours.” 

A second favourite of Fiona’s is the choker, which she loves for its simplicity and easy wearability. It, like the Zane ring, is going to stay on you when you’re moving, whether over the course of your day or, as Fiona puts it, on the dance floor, where any charms that happened to be hanging off your wrists or neck would be with the broken bottles on the ground. She’s there for her girls, no matter the situation, and that means putting in the work to make sure her jewelry is both beautiful and materially solid. To that end, one of the steps she’s added to her manufacturing process this season is a 14K gold or sterling silver plate over all her pieces. 

“It’s really great because it keeps your pieces shiny for a long time, and that’s why I think this season’s been a bit different than most, because it is quite shiny, but we love it because you can just polish it off with a cloth if it ever gets tarnished.” And, as her website knowingly promotes, the Zane ring won’t give you green fingers. 

I’m curious about her design and production process, wondering how she crafts her hard-edged, minimalist pieces. She responds without hesitation, launching into the steps as someone who knows them inside and out. 

“So we’ll carve the piece out of wax, and then you do something called cast it, which means that essentially the wax shape turns into a metal shape. And then that metal piece gets polished really fine, and then we take a mould of that one piece. And then from that mould, we can just inject it with more waxes and then keep turning it into metal and then polishing it up.” 

The final step is where the gold and silver plating happens – something that keeps Fiona’s line “nice and affordable for all our buds.” 

She jokes that, having delegated much of the actual jewelry making, she now sits and writes e-mails all day. While she still double-checks pieces before they get plated and sent out, she spends much of her time on overall brand direction, whether that involves being on the phone with shipping services, building relationships with stockists, or creating Excel spreadsheets. 

“You know, people will call me on a Friday night and be like, what are you doing? I’m like, oh, I’m just working on my Excel spreadsheets. But it’s fine; I’ve got a cider in my hand.”

It’s been a lot of hard work and a huge chunk of time (“I love the 60-hour workweeks and the high levels of stress,” Fiona says wryly), but Wolf Circus has become much more than a sum of its parts. While gathering inspiration from friends, Tumblr, and Pinterest starts the creative process, Fiona is the one shaping the vision all the way along, right through to the final pieces being sold in more than fifty locations across Canada and the U.S.A. 

“I don’t know what my true love is yet. It’s always a journey of understanding, but I’m definitely getting really into the marketing side of things right now and the creative direction and the designing, and that’s kind of my love.” And if you ever need help with Excel spreadsheets, you now know who to call. 

“It’s a skill of mine that people don’t usually think about. I always think of one of those weird reality T.V. shows where they say the talent, like, ‘Can rip a can of beer in half with his bare hands.’ ‘Really good at Excel.’” Pretty badass indeed, we’d say.

Get your hands on some Wolf Circus goods now at www.wolfcircus.com.