Every summer we set aside a Tuesday to talk about the small, independent jewellery makers we’re watching, and 2021 felt like the right year to widen the net. After eighteen months in which a great deal of dressing-up had been done from the waist up, on a screen, jewellery had taken on outsized importance. The right pendant or the right hoop carried the entire visual weight of an outfit during a year of Zoom dinners. As people began to dress for in-person again — for the first weddings, the first reunions, the first reservations — the question of what to put around the neck or in the ear was not a small one. The makers below all gave us beautiful, considered answers in the spring and summer of 2021, and most are still small enough to feel like a discovery worth sharing.
Sophie Buhai’s quiet sculpture
Sophie Buhai has spent the past several years making the case that sterling silver, used at scale and shaped with intention, can carry the same gravitas as a piece of mid-century furniture. Her drop earrings, the chunky Roman chains, the egg-shaped pendants — they all read as objects first and accessories second. Her work landed especially well in 2021 because the silhouette of pandemic-era dressing favoured fewer, larger, more declarative pieces. A single Buhai drop is enough; you don’t need to layer.
Sophie Bille Brahe’s poetry of pearls
If Buhai is sculpture, Sophie Bille Brahe is poetry. The Danish jeweller’s pearl earrings — the asymmetric drops, the constellations along the lobe — have been a quiet steady favourite of the editorial set, and 2021 saw her work move further into the mainstream as Net-a-Porter and Matchesfashion expanded the range. The pieces have a way of looking unstudied without being undesigned, which is exactly the difficulty of the form.
Foundrae’s heirloom heaviness
At the more substantial end of the indie price spectrum, Foundrae has been making solid-gold pendants and signet rings that are deliberately heavy in the hand and rich in symbolism. Beth Bugdaycay’s brand has built an obsessive following among women buying for themselves, and we noticed a particular spike in conversation through 2021 around the medallions, which had become the kind of piece you bought at a milestone birthday and wore the rest of the year. The pieces feel less like seasonal jewellery and more like architecture you can put on your collarbone.
Anita Ko and the new diamonds
Anita Ko‘s work — particularly the floating-diamond ear cuffs and the delicate gold chokers — was the through-line of the LA-based celebrity jewellery story of the late 2010s, and the brand kept refining the vocabulary in 2021. We saw an uptick in fine ear stacks across the year, with single-piercing wearers suddenly considering second and third holes, and Ko’s range made that shift feel less like a commitment and more like a small, sparkling routine.
Brent Neale’s playful color
Brent Neale‘s mushroom rings and rainbow-stone pieces were a different kind of antidote to the past year — joyful, art-school-coloured, unapologetically fun. Where so much of indie jewellery in the mid-2010s had been doing a kind of serious minimalism, Neale’s work in 2021 felt celebratory in a way that fit the season. We saw the cluster cocktail rings on more than one wedding-guest hand this June.
Catbird’s lock-and-key everyday
For the everyday end of the spectrum, Brooklyn’s Catbird kept doing its quiet work — the Sweet Nothing rings, the threader earrings, the wedding-band-as-everyday-band ethos. The brand had also pivoted hard into in-store welding services through 2021, with the chain-welded-on-the-wrist becoming one of the season’s signatures. It was the kind of small, intimate jewellery experience that felt like the opposite of a year of digital purchases — you went, you got it welded on, you wore it forever.
Mejuri’s mass-market shift
The story we kept watching but not yet joining was Mejuri, the Toronto-founded direct-to-consumer brand that had been the breakout of 2018-2019 and was now opening retail stores in major US cities through 2021. The brand had probably outgrown the “indie” label by this point, but its model of demystified fine-jewellery pricing and gallery-style store environments was still influencing the entire small-to-medium category. We’re noting it here because so many of the makers above were rethinking distribution, and Mejuri was the proof of concept that fine jewellery could sell at scale without losing its design integrity.
Loren Stewart and the gold that stays
Loren Stewart‘s LA studio kept turning out the kind of solid-gold staples that have become the new uniform — the chunky rope chains, the puffed paper-clip links, the simple bezel-set diamond solitaires worn on the right hand. The brand made the case for fine jewellery as everyday infrastructure rather than special-occasion costuming. We saw the small-but-substantial chain bracelets layered with welded-on Catbirds across a lot of summer-2021 wrists, and the small bezel-set solitaire necklaces becoming a kind of generational signature for women in their late twenties and thirties who were buying themselves jewellery for the first time.
Aurate’s transparent pricing
Like Mejuri, Aurate had been part of the new direct-to-consumer fine-jewellery wave, with showroom-style stores in NYC and a tightly edited core collection that emphasised solid-gold construction at prices that were still a stretch but were openly broken down in a way the category had not historically allowed. The brand’s recycled-gold sourcing story was central to its appeal in 2021, when the conversation about ethical sourcing in jewellery had moved from marketing copy to a primary purchase consideration. We were watching the brand’s expansion through the year as a signal of how mid-tier fine-jewellery would behave once the secondhand and lab-grown conversations matured.
What we are watching for the rest of summer
We’re keeping an eye on Adina Reyter‘s expanding diamond curves and the ongoing conversation around lab-grown stones, which felt like it might be the next conceptual shift in the category. We’re watching Lucy Folk‘s playful Australian summer launches with their food-and-flower references. And we’re watching Maria Tash‘s piercing studios, which had moved from a niche concern to a mainstream one through the year. By the time we come back at the end of the year for our winter jewellery roundup, we expect at least one of the names above to have a public-relations moment we didn’t see coming. We will see you on the third Tuesday of December for the winter list.