As a child, Lila Rice Marshall spent much of her playtime making jewelry with beads, stones, seaglass, fishhooks and other sea-faring paraphernalia and found objects. When she was 8 years old, her tool-loving mama gave Lila her very first tool: a pair of tiny jewelry-making pliers. It wasn't long before fourth-grade contemporaries began to employ her with the repair of their broken clasps, earrings, and strings of sparkling beads. It didn't pay much, a box of Lemonheads or perhaps some great holographic stickers, but it certainly felt like a grave responsibility and was treated as such. A decade later, Lila moved away from her native New England coastal town to the San Francisco Bay Area in academic pursuit, but she eventually came full circle when she stumbled into metalsmithing and rediscovered the joys of working with one's own hands. After a period of selling her unique hand-hewn jewelry off of her own neck, fingers and ears, ROUND Designs Jewelry was born in the fall of 2001. Lila has since returned to the East Coast and now lives, designs, and produces her line in New York City.