About
Carolina Spratling is a contemporary jewelry house in Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico. We make everything by hand, in .925 sterling silver, with natural stones cut by our own lapidary.
The house is run by Caroline Spratling Nabors and Mauricio Sánchez Torres, an industrial designer from Mexico City. It's named for their daughter, Carolina.
How we got to Taxco
Caroline grew up in Alabama and built a career in hospitality in New Orleans — work that earned her a place on Southern Living's Southerners Changing the South and on the London Observer's list of influential figures. She moved to Mexico full-time in 2020, met Mauricio, and started designing.
It was only later that she understood what she'd done. Her great-uncle, William Spratling, had lived in Alabama, then New Orleans, then Taxco — where in the 1930s he built the workshop and the school that turned a mining town into the center of Mexican silversmithing. Caroline had followed his exact path without knowing it.
She is the first Spratling to live and create in Taxco in almost sixty years.
The studio
We work out of Diego Rivera's former vacation home in Taxco. It's a strange privilege and we try to earn it: the house has been part of this town's artistic life for the better part of a century, and now it's where our pieces get drawn, argued over and made.
How we work
Everything is made by hand, in our workshop, using techniques Taxco has practiced for generations.
Cartoneado — sheets of .925 sterling are die-stamped and soldered one by one into a hollow form. It's what lets a substantial-looking bracelet weigh 40 grams instead of 200.
Calado — pierced openwork, where the negative space is cut out of the sheet by hand until what's left reads as a drawing in silver.
Media caña — a half-round section drawn to a point, which gives our Sol rays a rounded body instead of a flat profile.
Lost wax casting — the oldest metalworking technique there is. A model in wax, burned out, replaced by molten silver. We use it for one piece only.
Our stones are cut by hand by our lapidary in Mexico. Because they're natural, no two pieces come out the same — and we'd rather explain that than pretend otherwise.
What we make
Three collections. Sol, the first, built on the sun and Mexican solar iconography. Lengua, which takes the tongue from pre-Hispanic codices — a symbol of speech, knowledge and human connection — and turns it into links. And Pez, cast fish, drawn from pre-Hispanic iconography and from Caroline's life near the sea.
Alongside them we make things that aren't quite jewelry: bolo ties, scarf slides, hat ornaments, belt buckles. Those came from doing pop-ups in Austin and during the Houston rodeo, where people kept asking for pieces they could wear differently. We kept making them.
Giving back
10% of the proceeds from our Lengua Bracelet go to the Southern Smoke Foundation, which provides emergency funding to food and beverage workers. It's the industry Caroline came from, and one we still belong to.
Where to find us
We ship worldwide from our workshop in Taxco, and orders to the United States ship from Houston, Texas. Every piece is made once you order it, which takes four to six weeks. Write to us at hola@carolinaspratling.com.