About our Founder

“Jewelry Was Never on the Map”

There are summer nights in Puglia when the sky refuses to dim. My father strings Luminarie-arches of colored light-across the narrow streets of Maglie, and suddenly the town becomes a floating cathedral. I watched those lights as a child, half‑believing they could detach and drift into space. The lesson, whispered by every bulb, was contradiction: beauty can be immense, but your place beneath it must stay small.

I should have followed the script-help with the family craft, study something sensible, maybe marry the boy next door. Instead, at fifteen I let the breeze off the Adriatic push me toward a boarding gate. London, Hong Kong, San Francisco, New York … I kept moving the way the EuroStar goes to its next destination: boldly, without questions, and too fast to be captured. Always collecting fragments of other worlds. In tech I built global systems, algorithms that predicted demand, warehouses that breathed like machines. Impressive, yes; but it felt like conducting an orchestra with the sound turned off.

Music saved me from total silence. On weekends I slipped into DJ booths-plush rooftops, concrete basements, a festival in the desert-guiding strangers with bass lines instead of KPIs. I noticed how one well‑placed drop could tilt an entire crowd’s mood. Frequency, I learned, is more powerful than rhetoric.

Then a consultancy project sent me interviewing powerful women, and it shocked me learning: “I never know what jewelry to wear - I’ll get it wrong.” That disconnect-brilliant minds dimming themselves over a pair of earrings, tripped a fuse. One night, I opened a sketchbook meant for supply‑chain diagrams and to-do lists and drew instead a suspended arc: part luminarie arch, part treble clef. I mailed the first prototypes to those same women. “Wearing this, I enter the room already heard.”

At that moment, the map redrew itself. The lights of my childhood, the flight paths of my twenties, the sound waves of every DJ set…they weren’t detours, but coordinates converging on a single, unlikely point: jewelry.

So AliMa became my way of bottling resonance into metal. Not adornment-amplification. Pieces that float against convention the way luminarie float against the night: bold, unapologetic, impossible to ignore.

People ask why I left tech, why not run my father’s company, why jewelry of all things. Because surprise is its own language. Because the fastest way to rewrite expectations is to slip something luminous onto a finger or an ear and let it speak before you do.

Because every time someone says, “I didn’t see that coming” , another ceiling turns to sky.