Fine Jewelry That Comes With a Cause
When I'm designing
jewelry, I feel connected. I go off into my own world,
I guess I feel at peace. I have a lot of fun
putting things together in ways that are unexpected. I like scale, I like color, I
like shapes, I like textures. There's something really interesting about how you can put things together
in ways that are surprising. Creating things is like my life flow, like that's what makes me happy, it's how I feel connected back to everything else is by creating. My name is Lauren Harwell Godfrey, and I am a fine jewelry designer. Harwell Godfrey is known for its maximalist kind
of approach to jewelry, very colorful, very
intricate with patterns, a lot of details, and
I would say geometric is also a word that comes to mind. I like fitting things together in this geometric kind of pattern way. I talk a lot about my work being inspired by the African diaspora. I'm certainly inspired by travel. Trips to Morocco and India and, you know, places where the handicrafts
are just so robust have certainly influenced
the work that I like to do. We are in my studio right now, which is in Northern California, but I do a lot of my
production in New York, that's kind of the predominant place where production happens in
actually making the jewelry.
Well, the piece that
I'm taking you through are my 5 Stone Totem Drop Huggies, which is a pair of earrings and they're very gemmy, they're long, there's different colors
used in interesting ways, there's different types of
stones, there's different shapes. It's maximalist, it kind of goes back to all the things that I love to do.
I started with a sketch and I
actually sketched those out. I find that my greatest success comes when I'm as specific as possible with them to getting that end piece to look like what I had in my head. And then, from that point, we take that and we have a CAD designer that we really like to
work with who gets our work and knows how we like things. So we get these files where
you can turn things around and look at them in 3D, so it
gives me a really good sense. Then we make either a silver
casting or a wax casting, and for these, we did
silver, so it's very easy to like take those around and
like set stones into them. And I also drew an inspiration
for colors that I wanted and I was like, these
are generally speaking the colors that I want. But then I had to go and find those stones to fit those colors, and there was like a price
point that I'm trying to hit so there's all these different things that inform the stones.
So we had to go out, find the right sources for those stones. Hi.
Hey, welcome. Good to see you.
You too. I have different gem dealers
that I like to work with and I feel like those relationships
have really, you know, developed over time, and me,
like, learning more about their process and where
things are coming from and how they're sourcing and just kind of seeing their overall, you know, what they have to offer. Thinking that like maybe we
do like a big stone up here. Here's a different green
that's a little smaller. Yeah, it's quite a specimen, so that would be really incredible. Sometimes people actually
like reach out to me and just introduce themselves so they kind of come in
from different places, but then over time, as you work with them and you see their goods and
you learn more about, you know, what they're up to,
you figure out the ones that like most closely align to my needs from like the colors
and the kinds of stones and the scale of the stones
that I like to work with to, you know, does this fit in with kind of the overall
vision that I have for the brand and the types of people that I wanna work with
and, you know, support? I think I am going to go with these.
Okay.
Thank you. There are a lot of things
that have contributed to the person that I am now. I was born and raised
in Southern California, and my parents divorced when
I was young, when I was four, so I was really raised
predominantly by my mom, and my grandmother was very much around so a lot of very strong
women in the house. My grandmother would
wear jewelry every day and in fact I have a ring that I made that I'm wearing today that she wore in a different form every
day as a cocktail ring. I made it into a band that I could stack with my wedding ring and just kind of always
think of her with it. I knew I wanted to do
something in the arts, I knew I wanted to get paid for it, and advertising felt like
this really great fit for me. I worked in that industry for 15 years, I worked really hard and I just realized that I
had been burning myself out for a long time and I kind of hit a wall.
I knew that there were other
things inside of me creatively that I wanted to explore. That
led me to culinary school. So this winding road of
my careers and passions. But I wasn't figuring out what
I could add to that picture that was gonna be compelling
and interesting and different. So I took a step back and
made myself a necklace and I made it out of leather and crystals, it was very like festival wear and I wore it to a festival but people saw it and they
thought it was interesting and I started getting
requests for those necklaces. There's just something in
how it made me feel inside and how I felt working
with those materials and thinking in that way, like
these little mini sculptures. And that's not a way I had
ever really thought before and I really just felt
myself so compelled by it. Typically, when I have the
castings and I have the stones, it goes into production essentially, and that means that it's getting
made and being assembled.
We gather the stones and then
we move them to our setter. There's nothing like
working with somebody who's, you know, a master at
working with their hands. It's precious metals, it's precious materials, it's soft stones, we need technical masters
to be able to do this work and that's what makes it fine jewelry. So once that we get that seated in there, we can hammer the wall
over, make the stone tight. Our setter will receive those stones, those loose stones and our rough castings and he will actually go to the process of buffing 'em up a little bit, pre-polishing so that
they're easier to work with. And those castings are actually
really rough at this point, they're gold, but they're
not at all polished and he'll actually do some pre-polishing so that they're easier to work with. And he uses sandpaper,
he has a rubber wheel, just things to clean it up a bit. Once that's all done, he'll start to get ready to
set that stone into that piece. So he uses a shellac stick, and he makes it to the exact right shape of the thing we are working on.
Get it nice and gooey so it sticks, and we'll put it in place. Now it's prepared for
us to put the stone in. Then after that casting is secured, he'll actually start setting the stone, and what he wants to do is take
a little bit of that bezel, and like get a little
lip of it over each stone so he uses a micro hammer. Once the stone is secured, there's some cleanup that has to happen because of all that hammering so he actually uses a tool that,
it's like an engraving tool that cleans the wall of the bezel, and he actually has a way of buffing it so he can buff out all of
those like hammer marks.
They're small but they're there so gotta clean those marks up. Once all these pieces are put together, we then connect those jump rings to make the earring like a
whole piece and complete. And then, finally, we
actually do a final polish to make the gold really
beautiful and and sparkly. Hi.
How you doing? Good to see you. After production is over
and the earrings are done, they come back to me and I inspect them and just get to see the final thing and make sure it's what I had in my mind.
Oh, that's so pretty,
very clean, very nice. I love how the colors came together, I like that interplay of
opaque versus transparent. We call these a totem earring because I think there's
something totem-esque about them, the way that they are these things that are stacked up on top of each other in these different and
interesting shapes and colors. Thank you, Set.
You're welcome, it was my pleasure. I think designing jewelry has taught me to really trust myself. It's really, it's been
an interesting process because you truly are making something for people to buy, a specific thing, and when people get excited about that and connect to it, it's validating in the sense that you're like, oh wow, you know, I'm not crazy, this thing that I think is cool is cool and interesting
to someone else too.
I have always been
interested in philanthropy. There's just something
about making something that's so, you know,
it's such a luxury good, it's expensive, there's all these things, and yet the reality in our world is that there are people
suffering and and hurting. And so, I felt like I had
this unique opportunity to take those luxury goods
that people were coveting and actually turn that into money that I could donate back
to these organizations. So I actually donate a
hundred percent of the profits from the Charity Hearts, is
the collection that I call it. And I don't know, there's
this interesting collection of people who seem to be getting
behind it, which is cool. Kamala Harris wearing my
NAACP heart was super cool. I chose the NAACP as the charity
that I wanted to donate to 'cause I believe in the
work that they're doing, especially from a legal standpoint and how important that is to create, you know, an environment where black justice
actually comes to fruition.
Hilary Swank, Blake
Lively actually did a lot to promote the heart for
Everytown for Gun Safety, so did Julianne Moore. The last one I just introduced is for Everytown for Gun Safety. And as a mother and a human
and just a person who, you know, values safety and
wants everyone to be safe, I think we need to have
common sense gun laws. I think that giving back
is just something that, again, that I've believed
in for a really long time and this feels to me like
the right way to do it.
I know that the stuff that I make is not something that everyone can afford, and then I actually try to price these particular pieces
to be very approachable for within the fine jewelry luxury world, so that I can sell, you know, as many of them as I can and
be able to donate that money. I feel like creating and
designing really brings me into the thing I feel like
I'm supposed to be doing, and there's something about
that that's really satisfying and I just feel like I'm
a part of something bigger when I'm doing that work.
