Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Many jewellery designers draw on the lofty or the serious for inspiration – the sharp lines of a modernist building, for instance, or the brushstrokes of a Cy Twombly painting. But for the Lebanese-Brazilian Nadine Ghosn, it is the everyday that holds her in thrall.
“People will come up to me and be like: ‘Are you the burger girl?’” says Ghosn, referring to the Veggie Burger Ring she launched on her eponymous label in 2016, which shot her to fame. Comprising six stacked rings, made up of a diamond-studded rose-gold “bun”, a ruby “ketchup” layer, veggie patty, onion and tsavorite garnet-encrusted lettuce, it has become one of her best-selling designs, with a celebrity fan base including Drake, Pharrell and Nigo. “Thank God I love burgers!”
Since launching the burger ring, Ghosn has lent her touch to an array of quotidian objects – Lego bricks, bike chains, even forks and spoons – reimagining them as jewels in 18-carat gold and precious gemstones. It has helped her to build a direct-to-consumer business that listed €1.5mn in annual sales last year and looks set to exceed €2mn in 2024. “I’ve always been attracted to playful, colourful things,” says Ghosn, who is currently based between Paris and Singapore. “Things that remind you of your childhood, and that freedom and purity that exists in all of us before adulthood really comes into play.”
Her latest collection, which launched at Dover Street Market this month, continues in this vein. Color-full, a collaboration with Crayola, reimagines the familiar wax crayon as rose-, white- and yellow-gold bangles, with a tapered stone tip that comes in all eight colours of the original Crayola pack (from £18,100). Designed to be stacked on the wrist or worn individually, each bangle can be customised with a word or name in Crayola’s signature font.
The idea for it came to the designer after she found herself on a flight with a dead phone battery and decided to borrow some children’s crayons and a colouring book to while away the time. “It just brought up this therapeutic, meditative feeling,” says Ghosn, the first jeweller to collaborate with the art supplier. “We want [the collection] to bring out everyone’s inner child.”
The partnership with Crayola will span two years and will encompass rings, which can be customised with a personal drawing or doodle made out of gems, as well as collectible boxes. “One of the themes for the collaboration was colouring outside the lines,” says Ghosn. “That really resonates with me because my motto has always been don’t just think outside the box – think like there is no box. Just go for it and create.”
Ghosn attributes her approach to her unconventional journey into jewellery. Having grown up between Tokyo, Paris, California and New York, and graduated from Stanford University with a double major in economics and art, she worked as an associate at Boston Consulting Group before founding her brand. “I’m always learning,” she says. “You’ve never learned everything technically. You’ve never challenged all the craftsmen. There’s so much creativity that’s still left.”
Ghosn is still the only full-time employee of her business, working without an assistant, PR or marketing team – though she has worked with the same atelier in Italy for the past six years. “It’s a love-hate relationship,” she laughs. “I can be intense on production. I’ll create something in gold and then melt it, which most people would never do,” she says of her rigorous testing process. “But for me, if I’m going to make a crayon in fine jewellery, I want to make sure the proportions are right, that it sits well on the wrist, that you can wear it in the shower and while you’re playing tennis.”
She wears her stack of bracelets all the time. “It’s part of my uniform,” she says. “Everyone’s like: ‘Why do you have biceps?’ I’m like: ‘Because I have wrist weights on.’”
