Our story begins in the 1930s, when Rudolf Merkle (Guya's grandfather) founded a jewelry wholesale company in Pforzheim. His wife, the Italian Eva Gaietta, was his greatest inspiration when it came to designing particularly elegant pieces of jewelry. When Rudolf Merkle died in 1965, Guya's father Eddy Vieri took over the company. He was just 17 years old at the time.

With youthful enthusiasm and a captivating mixture of southern German sense of duty and Italian charisma, he is a key driver of the family business's success. And again, a woman is not entirely uninvolved: Eddy's wife Kate was behind the fashionable designs that even captivated clients from Japan and the UAE in the 80s.

Guya grew up with her family's jewelry craft, but initially didn't have a particular connection to it. When her father died suddenly in 2007, she agreed to continue his passion and work, but success was not forthcoming. It was only after the failure of the traditional family business that the young woman became genuinely curious: What had fascinated her ancestors so much about this luxurious material?

In search of answers, she completed an in-depth study of “Jewellery Essentials” in London, but it was only a private trip and a visit to a small mining community in Peru that gave the decisive impetus to a major rethink: Guya was deeply touched by the inhumane and environmentally destructive conditions she found in the gold mines and decided to take up her father's legacy again - but not without developing her very own vision: to revolutionize the jewellery industry in the long term and to courageously oppose conventional gold mining.

In 2012, Guya founded her non-profit foundation, the Earthbeat Foundation . In 2015, her own jewelry company, VIERI Fine Jewellery, was founded in Berlin. She deliberately chose the name VIERI, after all, her roots are part of her own history. Since 2019, the annual WORLD GOLD DAY has completed the entrepreneur's holistic concept.