View site at http://balboajewelry.com

Before Natalie Portman wore a Balboa pendant necklace with her apple-green t-shirt and gold-woven Chanel blazer.  Before Alicia Keyes put on a read head scarf and Balboa filigree earrings for a photo shoot.  And before Hillary Duff, Paris Hilton, Alicia Silverstone and Ashlee Simpson wore Balboa jewelry in fashion pages and on the red carpet, a young designer in the Carolinas put each one-of-a-kind piece together at her workbench.

Meet Jane Pope, founder and owner of Balboa, who still designs and creates each piece by hand. In her studio, beads of every color, silver and copper coins, pearls, antique brooches, precious and semi-precious stones, chains, clasps cover almost every inch of a long table and fill carts and bins. It’s here – upstairs in a circa 1840s storefront just blocks from the Atlantic Ocean – where she decides how to put all of the pieces together.

Since 2001, Jane has designed necklaces, earrings and bracelets – many incorporating as many as 2-15 vintage elements. And magazines from Cosmopolitan and Seventeen to Elle and Glamour have taken notice. The young designer and company owner was even named once of Marie Claire magazine’s “10 Best Stylemakers to Watch.”

Always a fan of vintage jewelry, Jane’s personal style and interests in both heirloom and fashion jewelry are what drives the company. Inspired by naturally-stylish role models like her grandmother – who wears a bracelet of intriguing charms gathered during decades of travel – one night Jane attached a vintage coral-pink flower pin to a long strand of yellow beads. She wore the piece to her work at an upscale North Carolina boutique the next morning, and answered questions about it all day. Six months, dozens more pieces, and a jewelry-making class later, a buyer from Barney’s New York was calling. Balboa Jewelry was on its way.

Jane is now the sole owner of the company (she’d begun with a partner, then bought out her share in 2003), and continues doing the design and metalwork herself. At her studio, Jane organizes and designs at once, arranging objects often found at flea markets and antique stores – everything from smooth agate “tusks” to chandelier crystals to well-worn lockets – and then doing the metalwork to incorporate the elements into singular, custom pieces.

The 29-year-old designer says she never knows what will spark her until she sees it. “I can have a whole studio of elements and supplies and be totally bored… and then I find a handful of great things – a vintage stick pin, beautiful jade beads, an elegant clasp – and that refreshes everything.  Then I am inspired again.”