As she celebrates the 17th year of her blog Gem Gossip, Danielle Miele is reflecting on the risks, moves, and life changes that led to the start and growth of her blog, which has now become a jewelry brand.
For her latest project—a selection of key charms—Miele is doing one of her favorite things as a jewelry blogger, collaborating with designers. The collection stems from Miele’s personal obsession with keys; a charm necklace that holds 40 different key pendants is her prized possession.
Over the years that she’s been writing Gem Gossip, Miele occasionally sold random pieces from her personal jewelry collection. After she had her first son, and then COVID happened, she couldn’t travel as much, and she began to expand her sales business, which includes vintage and antique jewelry.
She’d created Gem Gossip after her family moved to Nashville from western New York State in 2008. Miele was born and raised in Jamestown, N.Y., where her father was a serial entrepreneur. Her childhood jewelry box held mostly fashion jewelry, but it was fabulous. Think big, bold necklaces, lots of dangly earrings, plus a few Italian gold chains inherited from Miele’s paternal grandmother.
During high school, Miele worked at restaurants and retailers, and she used her earliest paychecks to open a jewelry store credit card and purchase her first fine pieces, including a gold bracelet.
She attended the State University of New York in Fredonia and got a degree in childhood education, partly to appease her father. He wanted her to have greater stability than he’d had as a self-employed person, Miele says.
“I love kids, and my dad always encouraged me to get a secure job that could guarantee a paycheck,” she says. “But I needed to have passion for what I do every day, and I found that passion the moment I quit everything and moved somewhere where I knew no one, had no job, and no car.”
That was July 2008, when she moved with her parents and sisters to Tennessee. As Miele thought more about what she wanted to do with her life, she realized that was to write, explore, and invest in jewelry.
“Having a blog was a relatively new concept in 2008, but there were many fashion blogs I loved to follow and read daily. So that’s where my career in jewelry began—the day I started Gem Gossip, with the tagline ‘Endless talk of all things sparkly.’”
To pay the bills, Miele got a nanny job, leaving for work at 6 a.m. after only a few hours of sleep. Her off-hours were spent researching gemstones, learning jewelry history, and visiting local antiques and jewelry stores. A 2009 blog post about Walton’s, an antique jewelry dealer, gained her new fans—and a new job.
“I wrote about my nice experience I had there and shared some photos of my new pendant I bought. A few months later, the owner of the store saw the post and reached out to me wondering if I could make a website for their store,” Miele says. “I was keen on the idea, and after creating a website for them, I ended up helping out on weekends, which turned into a full-time job.”
She didn’t love sales, so she was often in the back of the store working on inventory, placing orders, getting parts for repairs, and doing bookkeeping.
“I had an amazing boss who was willing to take me under his wing and teach me how to appraise jewelry, how to buy gold over the counter, and more,” Miele recalls. “I ended up going to GIA, to make things official, and in June of 2013 I received my Graduate Gemologist degree.”
Gem Gossip continued to grow, especially with features she created like Jewelry Road Trip, where Miele would travel around the U.S. and give an inside look at designers’ studios and brick-and-mortar stores in different cities. She was able to leave her retail job after five years and go full-time with the blog.
“I remember being nervous to tell my dad, since he spent most of my childhood convincing me that working for yourself is risky. But I had never been surer of something in my entire life,” Miele says.
Now she is curating jewelry to sell and collaborating with designers. For the key charms, she has worked with Kimberly Doyle, Yi Collection, Olivve, Vance Davidson, Sister Sister Jewelry, Mejia Jewelry, and most recently Svetlana Lazar.
And her father soon came around, Miele notes. “Needless to say, he supported my decision and is very proud.”
Top: Danielle Miele writes about and curates jewelry and runs a jewelry e-tail business. (Photos courtesy of Gem Gossip)
