KAKURU jewelry is handmade by the designer herself, Elina Kakourou, along with the experienced crafters of her team, who share her passion for creation and her sense of style. The jewelry is created in the workshop located in the same space as the store, at the center of Athens! In order to highlight this uniqueness of the KAKURU brand, we thought of creating a short video that describes the journey of our adornments, from the design, the processing of materials by our crafters - olive wood, semi-precious stones and metal - to their display in the store where you can try them on.

It may sound simple, but the truth is that such a project requires the collaboration of many talented people in order to achieve a perfect result. That's why we chose the best creators, the photographer Panos Georgiou (@panosgeorgiou) and the musician and videographer Alexandros Vilaras (@alexvilaras), who created a magical, in our opinion, video with cinematic aesthetics!

We met with the two creators one afternoon at the KAKURU workshop and store, where - given that these are two people with social concerns and sensitivities - our conversation included topics such as: how a brand utilizes its national identity, politics, travel, how our country handled the immigration issue, and much more! It would be nice to share this great conversation in its entirety with you at some point, but for now we will keep it short and sweet and focus on the discussion around the wonderful video they produced, which you can enjoy below.

The meeting 

Elina: Panos and I met through an advertising campaign in which I participated, and we worked together very nicely from the beginning. As a result, he was the first person I thought of when I decided to make this video.

Panos: Personally, I knew the KAKURU brand before I met Elina, from social media, and I was impressed. What I am looking for in my collaborations is the combination of aesthetics, passion for work and friendship. Values that I spotted in Alex, and that is why we have been collaborating for several years.

Alex: We both place the project above personal egos because we are interested in a nice result. We put our soul into all of our work.

The collaboration

Elina: We wanted to convey to the visitors of our website, to the extent that it’s possible, the store experience and how the jewelry travels from the workshop, where it is designed and created, to the counter, where visitors can try it on and talk with us. We also wanted to capture the materials we use, metals, olive wood and the three types of stone that come from different parts of Laconia. And finally, to show the crafters working in our workshop located in the same space as the store.

Panos: I was inspired from the beginning by Elina's love for the materials and I thought that we should take advantage of that. While I was thinking of ideas and trying to conceptualize them with Alex, movies like There Will Be Blood came to my mind, where Daniel Day-Lewis struggles with the elements of nature. We wanted to show the communication that Elina has with the materials. And then to somehow tie the music to the image. When we reached the point of the soundtrack, Elina put us in contact with musician Dim Vach.

Alex: It is very nice that the music was written specifically for this video, because it gives a uniqueness to the result. We also gave our input to the musician about how we envision it and it was very nice for us creatively to be involved in the process. In an audiovisual project, the sound has great significance, so you should not compromise with random music and try to match it to the image.

Panos: When you talk to someone in practical terms about a creative topic, everyone visualizes it from their own point of view. It is always interesting to see what everyone contributes to the project, because we each definitely think of different things. It is very difficult and rare to share the same mindset with someone, even with people who are very close aesthetically and have a common way of thinking. So when Dim Vach's music was added, that was also a challenge for Alex during the editing process.