On a day this spring, Rony Elka Vardi and Leigh Batnick Plessner stood outdoors 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 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 12 months, they opened a second, in Rockefeller Heart.
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 principally 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 inventive 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 recognized world wide.
Chris DeCrosta, a co-founder of the industrial real-estate agency GoodSpace, which has helped convey firms like Apple and Supreme to the neighborhood, stated Catbird was amongst a handful of manufacturers “that made individuals wish to come to Williamsburg to buy.” He added that almost all of its contemporaries — shops like Hen 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, however it has endured by being a gateway to the world of superb 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 offered by some designer manufacturers.
Catbird’s jewellery is taken into account demi-fine, a method that “bridges the hole between need 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 firms embrace 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 a very good 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 deal with 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 offered 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 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 inventive associate 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 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 types, juxtaposes a two-millimeter-wide pearl beside an excellent 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 amenities in 2018.
From July 2023 to June 2024, Catbird offered 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 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 seen {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 have been conscious of the corporate’s Brooklyn roots. Some had come for presents; others, to get “zapped” — a service, beginning at $98, by 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 nearly 60 % 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 principally 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 associate 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 need to 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 largest objective is to keep up the authenticity of the model and develop it in a considerate manner,” she stated.
Carolyn Rafaelian, whose widespread jewellery firm Alex and Ani undertook an bold growth funded by non-public fairness investments solely to crater and in the end file for chapter, 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.”
