Imagine. A woman was being ferried through life in a beautiful BMW so beloved, the car had its own Instagram page. Until someone crashed into it. Ultimately, the collision repair and insurance companies called it. The car was totaled. Devastated, the owner of the car sought a symbol and reminder of all the memories, the rites of passage carried by the car.

Finally, she sent parts of her car to Crash Jewelry in Los Angeles to have it upcycled into custom jewelry that would memorialize her BMW. This is when a bumper or side door becomes a custom cuff, perhaps in BMW “Lemans Blue,” with strips of hammered gold encircling it. Or maybe a BMW “Livery” cuff, bearing narrow bands of color.

It has been 10 years since metalsmith Christi Schimpke established Crash Jewelry within Beverly Coachcraft, her husband Dan Schimpke’s collision repair facility. She, who has a background in art history, supported by a master’s degree in Italian Renaissance portraiture, plus history working for the Getty Museum, decided to trade the bureaucracy of art for an adhocracy, enabling her to create and celebrate it rather than govern it.

“Having taken metalsmith classes as a hobby, I had a sense of the craft,” said Schimpke, “but this time I got serious and fell in love with it. I started my own business in a friend’s garage, making jewelry out of silver and gemstones.”Everything changed when Schimpke’s husband offered her studio space in one of his garages at Beverly Coachcraft.

“After being in that collision repair environment for a while, admiring the cars that came through and wondering what happened to the fender or side door, where it went and whether it got recycled, I considered what it would take to make collectible jewelry from luxury car metal. The paint reminded me of Cloisonné.”

Schimpke had been to an art gallery featuring an artist who made collages out of car metal. She found it very Mondrian, an abstraction of clean lines and color blocks. And she had wondered if she might make something of this, in jewelry. A researcher at heart, she investigated whether anyone else was making jewelry out of car metal. What she discovered was a niche just waiting for her to fill it.

“In the beginning,” she said, “it was really hard. The paint didn’t want to stay on the metal when I went to bend it. And it’s all about the paint. Yet, after 10 years of trial and error, we’ve developed our own production techniques. I work with Bryan Bischoff, a very artistic renaissance kind of guy who handles the engineering side of things.”

A symbol and reminder

While Schimpke’s jewelry line is largely dependent upon the materials that become available via her clients and her husband’s, she is careful to create her pieces, not from tragic events, but from “fender benders,” crashes that hurt the car, not its passengers. It’s really about the phoenix rising from the ashes, she said, into something fresh and beautiful.

“People are constantly sending me metals,” she said, “among them racecar drivers who have been in a fender bender and want something made of it. I’m also working with Cadillac. Someone on their marketing team, who is always looking for something new for their company store, saw us at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance last year. We partnered with Cadillac to produce limited-edition upcycled jewelry made from CT5-V Blackwing steel in original General Motors colors. They sent me practically a whole car.”

It is important to Schimpke to know as much about the provenance of her materials as possible, so she can memorialize the car and provide details to her customers via a small plaque inside the jewelry.

In fact, she has a room in her husband’s garage, not unlike the research libraries from her art history days, only filled with sheet metal she has organized by make, model, color, and history.

“People bond with their cars,” she said, “and they want to know the provenance of their luxury car jewelry, as well.”

Christi Schimpke was at Laguna Seca last year, during Porsche’s 75th anniversary celebration, when a spectator approached her and said, “What do you have from a Porsche GT3 RS car in lava orange?” Schimpke showed him what she had.

“It literally gets that specific,” she said. “A racecar driver sent me the door from his ‘Ferrari Challenge’ car he wrecked at Laguna Seca, when he got pushed into a wall. The door still had decals on it, and he was thinking I could make ‘some really cool jewelry’ out of it. This, for that guy, would immortalize the car. I always try to accommodate.”

For some collectors, the purchase is aspirational, as the piece they acquire becomes a symbol of the car they one-day hope to own.

Although Schimpke crafts her cuffs, bracelets, earrings, and necklaces mostly out of car metal, she also introduces gemstones in a cabochon setting, which elevates the look.

She’s actually planning to work with a jeweler who can set faceted gemstones into her cuffs, like diamonds and sapphires, to further enhance her pieces.

“It’s kind of an ‘If I’m going to wear my Aston Martin, I want it to be blingy.’ It’s like customizing a car, using the metal, the color, the stones they want as they build their own car cuff.”

As the Schimpkes work adjacent one another in their garages at Beverly Coachcraft, each is restoring cars in their own way, one to get it back out on the road, and the other to memorialize the vehicle by turning it into “classic car couture.”

For more information about Crash Jewelry, visit www.crashjewelry.com or visit Pebble Beach RetroAuto, a carefully curated assortment of car-related collectibles, featured in the Concours Village from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.