On a day this spring, Rony Elka Vardi and Leigh Batnick Plessner stood exterior the Bedford Avenue storefront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that for years was a location of their jewellery boutique, Catbird. The cramped house, now a restaurant serving espresso and Argentine pastries, has little greater than 200 sq. ft.
“It’s even tiny for a espresso store,” Ms. Vardi, 54, stated.
Catbird opened at that location in 2006, about two years after Ms. Vardi began the corporate. However over the course of a decade, it outgrew the tiny store. In 2022, Ms. Vardi and Ms. Batnick Plessner began promoting Catbird’s collection of itty-bitty, layerable jewellery at a close-by house in Williamsburg about 10 occasions the dimensions. By then they’d additionally opened a retailer in downtown Manhattan; final yr, they opened a second, in Rockefeller Heart.
Quickly after got here places in Boston, Los Angeles and Washington. There are plans to open a San Francisco retailer this August and Catbird is aiming to open 10 extra places in locations like Atlanta and Chicago by 2026, additional increasing the nationwide footprint of what has largely remained a cult model.
To stroll right into a Catbird retailer is to enter a world the place jewellery and trendy knickknacks from the model and different makers are displayed alongside prim trappings like starched white-lace curtains, vintage furnishings, overgrown home vegetation and smoky, barely crooked mirrors.
Ms. Batnick Plessner, 45, the corporate’s chief inventive officer, stated the model’s aesthetic delicately straddles “trash and treasure.”
When Catbird was based, in 2004, these pillars of its identification may be used to explain Williamsburg. Again then, the world was within the midst of reworking from an industrial neighborhood into a stylish vacation spot identified world wide.
Chris DeCrosta, a co-founder of the business real-estate agency GoodSpace, which has helped convey corporations like Apple and Supreme to the neighborhood, stated Catbird was amongst a handful of manufacturers “that made individuals need to come to Williamsburg to buy.” He added that the majority of its contemporaries — shops like Fowl and Gentry — “don’t exist anymore.” (Catbird’s Williamsburg retailer is now within the house previously occupied by Gentry.)
Catbird might have benefited from driving the wave of contemporary Williamsburg’s reputation, but it surely has endured by being a gateway to the world of wonderful jewellery for a lot of millennial and Gen Z clients. Its dainty items fabricated from recycled 14-karat-gold and different luxurious supplies are sometimes priced decrease than jewellery fabricated from non-precious metals bought by some designer manufacturers.
Catbird’s jewellery is taken into account demi-fine, a mode that “bridges the hole between want and approachability,” stated Sam Broekema, the editor in chief of Solely Pure Diamonds, a web site and journal revealed by the Pure Diamond Council. Youthful demi-fine jewellery corporations embrace Stone and Strand, Mejuri and AUrate. Mr Broekema stated Catbird is “the O.G.”
The concept for Catbird got here to Ms. Vardi within the early 2000s, not lengthy after she moved to Brooklyn in 1999. She was working on the cosmetics firm Bliss and had about $16,000 in financial savings. Williamsburg’s less expensive rents again then made the neighborhood an excellent place for pursuing “private tasks,” as she put it. Hers can be a boutique promoting jewellery, garments, paper items and residential wares from varied small manufacturers.
“There have been only a few locations to buy,” Ms. Vardi stated.
Quickly after beginning Catbird, she determined to give attention to promoting jewellery. She gravitated towards items with diminutive proportions and a sure handwrought attraction, from manufacturers like Digby & Iona and Elisa Solomon, which Catbird has bought since its early days.
“I’ve at all times beloved small jewellery as a result of I’m usually an unfussy particular person,” Ms. Vardi stated.
Different gadgets Catbird was promoting again then included merchandise from a greeting-card firm began by Ms. Batnick Plessner, who first met Ms. Vardi in 2005. She joined the Catbird employees later that yr and, since 2008, has been Ms. Vardi’s near-equal inventive companion within the enterprise.
The ladies have marketed merchandise by leaning closely into the private relationship individuals can have with jewellery. A part of Ms. Batnick Plessner’s job is to give you lyrical names for Catbird items — like Dewdrop, for a tiny stud earring — to assist make them extra covetable.
“It’s the thought of, ‘What factor can it tug on in somebody’s emotional heart?’” she stated.
Catbird additionally makes use of its jewellery’s scale as a promoting level, generally selling its baubles as “the tiniest.” The Dewdrop stud ($128 every), certainly one of its hottest types, juxtaposes a two-millimeter-wide pearl beside a good smaller diamond, each of that are held in place by 14-karat-gold prongs not a lot bigger than grains of sand.
A large portion of Catbird’s in-house line has at all times been made in Brooklyn; first at factories in Williamsburg, and now on the Brooklyn Navy Yard close to Fort Greene, the place the corporate moved its headquarters and manufacturing services in 2018.
From July 2023 to June 2024, Catbird bought about 350,000 items from its in-house line; about half had been made on the Navy Yard. Joel Weiss, an proprietor of Carrera Casting in Manhattan’s Diamond District, which develops jewellery with Catbird and different manufacturers like David Yurman, Judith Ripka and Costco, referred to as Catbird a “monster.” He stated that he couldn’t consider one other firm that produces the next quantity of items in New York Metropolis.
Ms. Vardi and Ms. Batnick Plessner stated an indication that Catbird had penetrated sure taste-making crowds got here in 2012, when some style observers observed {that a} ring it had been promoting — a gold band meant to be worn over the primary knuckle of a finger — may need impressed the jewellery in a Chanel high fashion runway present.
“That was one of many first inklings that it was greater than a tiny retailer,” Ms. Batnick Plessner stated.
Since then, Catbird items have been tagged in numerous TikTok movies and worn by Taylor Swift and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Collaborations with the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, J. Crew, musicians like Phoebe Bridgers and actresses like Jenny Slate have additionally helped to develop its profile.
On a Sunday in April, buyers in Boston wandered out and in of the Catbird retailer that opened on Newbury Avenue in December. Not all had been conscious of the corporate’s Brooklyn roots. Some had come for items; others, to get “zapped” — a service, beginning at $98, through which chain bracelets are laser soldered round clients’ wrists at specialised in-store cubicles.
The nationwide growth of Catbird, which has some 234 staff and makes nearly 60 p.c of its annual gross sales on-line, has been partly led by a comparatively new chief govt, Motoko Sakurai, who joined the corporate about two years in the past. Ms. Vardi has wound down her day-to-day involvement within the enterprise; she now largely handles inventive work alongside Ms. Batnick Plessner.
Catbird’s retail growth has been funded partially by a spherical of personal fairness funding from backers together with Victor Capital Companions. Ms. Sakurai, Ms. Vardi and Ms. Batnick Plessner declined to reveal the quantity of personal fairness funding Catbird has obtained. Dave Affinito, a companion at Victor Capital Companions, declined to reveal the dimensions of the agency’s funding in an e-mail. However he stated that he has been a fan of the corporate for a while and that “extra individuals should have the Catbird expertise.”
Ms. Sakurai, 50, who goes by Mo, beforehand held govt roles at David Yurman and The Frye Firm. She acknowledged that opening shops throughout the nation poses dangers. “My greatest objective is to take care of the authenticity of the model and develop it in a considerate means,” she stated.
Carolyn Rafaelian, whose standard jewellery firm Alex and Ani undertook an bold growth funded by personal fairness investments solely to crater and finally file for chapter, understood the need to develop Catbird’s brick-and-mortar footprint. “It’s detrimental to a model at a sure level in the event that they don’t have a bodily presence,” she stated.
Ms. Rafaelian, who left Alex and Ani because the enterprise was declining and has since based different jewellery manufacturers like &Livy, added that Catbird’s enterprise mannequin has positioned it to climate rising pains.
“Anybody can create concepts and ship it abroad to have it made, however they’re artisans,” she stated. “It’s a part of their story. You aren’t simply shopping for a trinket.”
