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. toes.
“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 choice of itty-bitty, layerable jewellery at a close-by house in Williamsburg about 10 occasions the dimensions. By then that they had additionally opened a retailer in downtown Manhattan; final 12 months, they opened a second, in Rockefeller Middle.
Quickly after got here areas 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 areas 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 crops and smoky, barely crooked mirrors.
Ms. Batnick Plessner, 45, the corporate’s chief artistic officer, stated the model’s aesthetic delicately straddles “trash and treasure.”
When Catbird was based, in 2004, these pillars of its id may be used to explain Williamsburg. Again then, the realm was within the midst of remodeling from an industrial neighborhood into a stylish vacation spot identified around the globe.
Chris DeCrosta, a co-founder of the industrial real-estate agency GoodSpace, which has helped carry corporations like Apple and Supreme to the neighborhood, stated Catbird was amongst a handful of manufacturers “that made folks wish to come to Williamsburg to buy.” He added that the majority of its contemporaries — shops like Chicken and Gentry — “don’t exist anymore.” (Catbird’s Williamsburg retailer is now within the house previously occupied by Gentry.)
Catbird could have benefited from driving the wave of recent Williamsburg’s reputation, nevertheless it has endured by being a gateway to the world of wonderful jewellery for a lot of millennial and Gen Z clients. Its dainty items manufactured from recycled 14-karat-gold and different luxurious supplies are sometimes priced decrease than jewellery manufactured 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, an internet site and journal printed by the Pure Diamond Council. Youthful demi-fine jewellery corporations embody Stone and Strand, Mejuri and AUrate. Mr Broekema stated Catbird is “the O.G.”
The thought 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 place for pursuing “private tasks,” as she put it. Hers could 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 concentrate on promoting jewellery. She gravitated towards items with diminutive proportions and a sure handwrought allure, 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 individual,” Ms. Vardi stated.
Different objects 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 workers later that 12 months and, since 2008, has been Ms. Vardi’s near-equal artistic accomplice within the enterprise.
The ladies have marketed merchandise by leaning closely into the non-public relationship folks can have with jewellery. A part of Ms. Batnick Plessner’s job is to provide you with lyrical names for Catbird items — like Dewdrop, for a tiny stud earring — to assist make them extra covetable.
“It’s the concept of, ‘What factor can it tug on in somebody’s emotional middle?’” 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), considered one of its hottest kinds, juxtaposes a two-millimeter-wide pearl beside a fair 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 have 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 a better 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 vogue observers observed {that a} ring it had been promoting — a gold band meant to be worn over the primary knuckle of a finger — might have inspired 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 videos 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, customers in Boston wandered out and in of the Catbird retailer that opened on Newbury Road in December. Not all have been conscious of the corporate’s Brooklyn roots. Some had come for items; others, to get “zapped” — a service, beginning at $98, during which chain bracelets are laser soldered round clients’ wrists at specialised in-store cubicles.
The nationwide growth of Catbird, which has some 234 workers and makes virtually 60 p.c of its annual gross sales on-line, has been partly led by a comparatively new chief government, 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 artistic 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 accomplice 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 folks should have the Catbird expertise.”
Ms. Sakurai, 50, who goes by Mo, beforehand held government roles at David Yurman and The Frye Firm. She acknowledged that opening shops throughout the nation poses dangers. “My greatest purpose is to take care of the authenticity of the model and develop it in a considerate means,” she stated.
Carolyn Rafaelian, whose common jewellery firm Alex and Ani undertook an bold growth funded by personal fairness investments solely to crater and finally file for bankruptcy, understood the will to broaden 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.”
