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Many jewelry designers are inspired by the elevated or serious: the clean lines of a modernist building, for example, or the brush strokes of a Cy Twombly painting. But for Lebanese-Brazilian Nadine Ghosn, it is the day-to-day life that captivates her.
“People come up to me and say, ‘Are you the hamburger girl?’” Ghosn says, referring to the Veggie Burger Ring She launched her self-titled label in 2016, which shot her to fame. Composed of six stacked rings, made up of a rose gold “bun” encrusted with diamonds, a layer of ruby “ketchup”, veggie burger, onion and lettuce inlaid with tsavorite garnet, it has become one of his most popular designs. sold out, with a celebrity fan base including Drake, Pharrell and Nigo. “Thank God I love hamburgers!”
Since launching the hamburger ring, Ghosn has lent his touch to a variety of everyday objects (Lego bricks, bicycle chains, even forks and spoons) by reimagining them as jewelry in 18-karat gold and gemstones. It has helped him build a direct-to-consumer business that generated €1.5 million in annual sales last year and looks set to surpass €2 million by 2024. “I’ve always been drawn to fun, colorful things,” Ghosn says. . that he currently resides 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 come into play.”
His latest collection, which was launched in Dover Street Market This month, continue in this vein. Color-full, a collaboration with Crayola, reinvents the well-known wax crayon in the form of rose, white and yellow gold bracelets, with a tapered stone tip that comes in all eight colors of the original Crayola pack (from £18,100). Designed to stack on the wrist or wear individually, each bracelet can be personalized with a word or name in Crayola’s signature font.
The designer came up with the idea after she found herself on a flight with a dead phone battery and decided to borrow some children’s crayons and a coloring book to pass the time. “She just created this therapeutic, meditative feeling,” says Ghosn, the first jeweler to collaborate with the art purveyor. “We want [the collection] to bring out the inner child of each one.”
The partnership with Crayola will last two years and will include rings, which can be personalized with a personal drawing or gem doodle, as well as collectible boxes. “One of the themes of the collaboration was coloring outside the lines,” Ghosn says. “That really resonates with me because my motto has always been to not just think outside the box: think like it doesn’t exist. Just go ahead and create.”
Ghosn attributes his approach to his unconventional journey into jewelry. 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 have never challenged all the craftsmen. “There is still a lot of creativity.”
Ghosn remains her company’s only full-time employee, working without an assistant, public relations or marketing team, although she has worked with the same shop in Italy for the past six years. “It’s a love-hate relationship,” she laughs. “I can be intense in production. I will create something in gold and then melt it down, something most people would never do,” she says of her rigorous testing process. “But in my case, if I’m going to make a fine jewelry crayon, I want to make sure the proportions are right, that it fits the wrist well, that you can wear it in the shower and while playing. tennis.”
She wears her bunch of bracelets all the time. “It’s part of my uniform,” she says. “Everyone says, ‘Why do you have biceps?’ I say, ‘Because I have weights on my wrists.'”