THE EPIPHANY BEHIND THE IVORY OYSTER
I came across a motivational speech the other day that said: “we need to wander for as long as it takes in order to find our purpose.” Even when the journey feels heavy, when grief and sorrow overshadow the present, we must remember: life is happening through us, not to us."
Hi, I’m Margherita and I’m the mind behind The Ivory Oyster.
Like many twenty-somethings, I grew up as a wildly ambitious and delusional daydreamer, convinced that everything was possible, until that optimism was challenged by the skeptical, often disillusioned society we live in. In my teenage years, my future was a mix of passions. I used to dream about fashion and editorial jobs in London and NYC, nights spent in the world’s most beautiful hotels, airports as familiar as home, production teams as my family and the idea of “making your life a work of art”, as D’Annunzio once said.
I loved visuals, and I loved planning all kind of events. I fell in love with photography at a really young age, when I bought my first camera probably with my birthday money; and I threw my first party at nine – a so called Nutella Party to mark the end of school – and realized that I loved creating experiences as much as capturing them.
I’ve always been a Virgo at heart: organized, meticulous, and endlessly obsessed with aesthetics and details, whether it was setting tables, designing concepts, or turning ideas into tangible beauty. I loved capturing love in all its ways, raw feelings, and everything unpolished yet real.
One thing has always been certain: I wanted to create something that carried my signature. Yet, after university, I stepped into the workforce like anyone else, hoping to gain clarity and to make a living. Over the last six years, I’ve done it all: customer service, sales, luxury travel advising, photoshoots production, retail, travel design. Corporates, start ups, shops, small businesses. But for one reason or another – closures, crises, pandemics – I often found myself back at the starting point and lost once again.
But this last time was different. The reality I was living felt suffocating, joyless, stripped of meaning. I had no idea what I was doing with my life. The 17-year-old me was outraged. I could hear her saying: “Girl what the hell are you doing? What happened to all our dreams? What about the freedom, the beauty, the life we imagined? What about inspiring others and becoming the best version of ourselves?”
So I listened. I faced what was holding me back - fear, doubts, no backup plans - and after a year of looking for jobs I never really wanted, I decided to hire myself to finally become all the things I wanted to be.
Because the world is your oyster.
And that’s how The Ivory Oyster was born, in one of those sleepless onyx nights, as the sum of everything my soul always craved: visuals, hosting, travel, hospitality, design, planning, love, fashion, photography, editorial content, videography, social media. All of it, within a single oyster.
Inside every oyster lies a pearl, a word that traces back to the Latin word “margaritas”. A serendipitous detail, as if it had always been destined.
I’m beginning this journey as a content studio, capturing moments for couples, vendors, venues, and fancy events. A great job for an empath like me!! But I have a feeling we’ll grow beyond that. From today The Ivory Oyster is also a journal: my dream of building a curated digital archive where I can share inspiration, thoughts, wedding stories, event concepts, bachelorette destinations, fashion, hospitality, travel notes and a lot more. A place to bring you behind the scenes of my journey as a young entrepreneur and into the beauty I have the opportunity to experience.
And perhaps that’s the true epiphany: our purpose is never lost, only waiting for us to claim it. The pain, the suffering, the grief, the feeling of hating your life because you know in your heart it was never meant to feel that way… trust me, I know the feeling. Do the work of introspection, understand what is limiting you from believing that you CAN have a life you want, and use the anger and the pain and that destruction energy as catalyst to be resilient and brave enough to release your old self and commit to your authentic self.
It has always been inside of us, and The Ivory Oyster is that realization for me.
I don’t know exactly how I’ll make it, I’m just sorting everything out, but I am curious and excited to see where this path leads because it is the realest, strongest feeling of being on the right path I have ever known.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. You’ve already made my day.
I can’t wait to see where this journey will take us.
Margherita xx
