The Juliana phenomena started, I believe, when I first started my
web site in May of 2000. I didn't have a way of making links for
DOW ( a discussion of jewelcollect: Designer of the Week) without using the numbering system of my web site (it's data base driven and numbers are automatically assigned) so I put up a bunch of pictures for my personal DOW -- basically "what I collect". It was in the identical format as the "My Juliana" pages
are now, just called "DOW". I posted to JC to come look and people
did. There was a great uproar, well maybe a mini uproar, but all
kinds of people posted to the JC list saying they had had pieces
very similar to mine, had sold them or kept them but what did we
know about them???
One or two people posted that they had or had seen pieces like mine but were marked Tara or Gloria. Then a couple of people posted that they had paper-tagged pieces of Juliana. A few more Juliana pieces were found, then I found a couple and the consensus was -- what I
had believed all along -- that all of the pieces were made by one
manufacturing company.
We diverged on opinions of whether the five link bracelets were sold to different companies who set their own stones in them or whether they were made start to finish and sold by the same company. People began looking for more of these pieces and the name quickly caught on as a descriptor for site sales and eBay.
Later, perhaps in the last couple of years, people who realized Juliana was commanding a better price than many of the other unmarked pieces or who just didn't know the difference began using the name Juliana. It wasn't until I met Frank that we got more of the story, ala the VFCJ article. And it wasn't until recently that
we realized that many if not most of the Juliana tagged pieces don't necessarily look like the glitzy, big five-link bracelet and all the accompanying pieces, for which we can thank Carol.
Although I will say that two of the Juliana-tagged pieces I own are those big, side hinged bangle bracelets so some of it must be more of the glitzy stuff we are accustomed to calling "Juliana".
