Building a jewelry brand in the days before Instagram meant getting in your car and tracking down anyone who would give you a shot, Jennifer Meyer will tell you.
“I was driving downtown, in Beverly Hills, to Culver City—all over town. If it said ‘jeweler’ on the door, I’d go in and say, ‘I have an idea for a leaf,’” Meyer told Newsweek. “I had no idea there was a price of gold. I had no idea that you had to make a mold. I had no clue and there was no way of learning online. You couldn’t ChatGPT it. You learned from being on the ground.”
The leaf had been just an idea when Meyer started her namesake line. Then the costume designer for an upcoming romantic comedy walked into Ralph Lauren’s West Coast office, where Meyer was working in public relations at the time. The designer saw Meyer’s leaf necklace and said she wanted to show it the movie’s lead, Jennifer Aniston.
For weeks, Meyer didn’t hear anything. She had never shown anyone her pieces before and hoped that the film crew had just thrown it in the trash. But then the phone rang.
“I got a call from The Break-Up saying, ‘We love all these pieces. We need three of each by next week,” Meyer said. “I was like, ‘Well, those are my samples. I’m going to need them back.’ I didn’t even know how to reproduce them.”
She managed to turn them around quickly, and unfamiliar with pricing, ended up charging the movie below cost. The Break-Up, which grossed over $205 million worldwide, set off “leaf mania.”
“It was like everyone had to have this leaf,” Meyer recalled. “It was truly incredible. And that was the beginning of my business. It was like a rocket ship.”
It was a moment that would be impossible to recreate today, she said. The same tools that make it easier to launch a brand now also make it harder to stand out.
“Instagram is such a sales tool,” she said. “But at the same time, you now see a million brands all day long. The brands you followed were the brands you purchased. Now you just see a new brand and a new brand.”
Back then, Meyer had no choice but to depend on institutional gatekeepers, like Barneys or Net-a-Porter, or people simply wearing her jewelry in their day-to-day life. Meyer had to convince people to like more than just one of her designs, she needed to turn a cultural moment into a 20-year business. The answer, for Meyer, was in creating jewelry that transcends time.
“I really wanted to make jewelry that you wore and never took off, that you loved, that became a part of you,” she said. “If you think about people, most of the time, they always wear that necklace or they always wear those hoops.”
She also wanted jewelry to hold meaning. In her necklace, she saw a daily reminder that there were always new beginnings.
It’s how Meyer sees all jewelry. When she looks into her jewelry box, she sees more than gold bracelets or diamond earrings. She sees stories of birthdays, graduations and moments spent with her grandmother Edith, who taught her to make jewelry when she was six years old.
When her grandma became sick and started telling Meyer to take pieces of jewelry home with her, Meyer remembers refusing, feeling like that meant Edith was close to the end of her life. But there was one pearl ring that her grandmother insisted she took.
“I literally wear it every single day,” she said. “I realized in that moment, when she was trying to give me her jewelry, she wanted to watch me want it and love it. It wasn’t just getting rid of stuff, there was joy [in giving it away].”
That idea has stayed with Meyer as the brand has expanded beyond jewelry.
“You’re never going to regret giving somebody a piece of jewelry, and you’re never going to regret receiving a piece of jewelry,” she said. “It’s different than anything else.”
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