When I'm designing jewelry, I feel connected.
I go off into my own world, I guess I feel at peace.
I have a lot of fun putting things together
in ways that are unexpected.
I like scale, I like color, I like shapes, I like textures.
There's something really interesting about
how you can put things together in ways that are surprising.
Creating things is like my life flow,
like that's what makes me happy,
it's how I feel connected back
to everything else is by creating.
My name is Lauren Harwell Godfrey,
and I am a fine jewelry designer.
Harwell Godfrey is known
for its maximalist kind of approach to jewelry,
very colorful, very intricate with patterns,
a lot of details, and I would say geometric
is also a word that comes to mind.
I like fitting things together
in this geometric kind of pattern way.
I talk a lot about my work
being inspired by the African diaspora.
I'm certainly inspired by travel.
Trips to Morocco and India and, you know,
places where the handicrafts are just so robust
have certainly influenced the work that I like to do.
We are in my studio right now,
which is in Northern California,
but I do a lot of my production in New York,
that's kind of the predominant place
where production happens in actually making the jewelry.
Well, the piece that I'm taking you through
are my 5 Stone Totem Drop Huggies,
which is a pair of earrings
and they're very gemmy, they're long,
there's different colors used in interesting ways,
there's different types of stones, there's different shapes.
It's maximalist, it kind of goes back
to all the things that I love to do.
I started with a sketch and I actually sketched those out.
I find that my greatest success comes
when I'm as specific as possible with them
to getting that end piece to look like
what I had in my head.
And then, from that point,
we take that and we have a CAD designer
that we really like to work with who gets our work
and knows how we like things.
So we get these files where you can turn things around
and look at them in 3D, so it gives me a really good sense.
Then we make either a silver casting or a wax casting,
and for these, we did silver, so it's very easy
to like take those around and like set stones into them.
And I also drew an inspiration for colors that I wanted
and I was like, these are generally speaking
the colors that I want.
But then I had to go and find those stones
to fit those colors,
and there was like a price point that I'm trying to hit
so there's all these different things
that inform the stones.
So we had to go out,
find the right sources for those stones.
Hi. Hey, welcome.
Good to see you. You too.
I have different gem dealers that I like to work with
and I feel like those relationships have really, you know,
developed over time, and me, like, learning more about
their process and where things are coming from
and how they're sourcing
and just kind of seeing their overall,
you know, what they have to offer.
Thinking that like maybe we do like a big stone up here.
Here's a different green that's a little smaller.
Yeah, it's quite a specimen,
so that would be really incredible.
Sometimes people actually like reach out to me
and just introduce themselves
so they kind of come in from different places,
but then over time, as you work with them
and you see their goods and you learn more about, you know,
what they're up to, you figure out the ones
that like most closely align to my needs
from like the colors and the kinds of stones
and the scale of the stones that I like to work with to,
you know, does this fit in
with kind of the overall vision that I have
for the brand and the types of people
that I wanna work with and, you know, support?
I think I am going to go with these.
Okay. Thank you.
There are a lot of things that have contributed
to the person that I am now.
I was born and raised in Southern California,
and my parents divorced when I was young, when I was four,
so I was really raised predominantly by my mom,
and my grandmother was very much around
so a lot of very strong women in the house.
My grandmother would wear jewelry every day
and in fact I have a ring that I made
that I'm wearing today that she wore
in a different form every day as a cocktail ring.
I made it into a band
that I could stack with my wedding ring
and just kind of always think of her with it.
I knew I wanted to do something in the arts,
I knew I wanted to get paid for it,
and advertising felt like this really great fit for me.
I worked in that industry for 15 years,
I worked really hard
and I just realized that I had been burning myself out
for a long time and I kind of hit a wall.
I knew that there were other things inside of me creatively
that I wanted to explore. That led me to culinary school.
So this winding road of my careers and passions.
But I wasn't figuring out what I could add to that picture
that was gonna be compelling and interesting and different.
So I took a step back and made myself a necklace
and I made it out of leather and crystals,
it was very like festival wear
and I wore it to a festival
but people saw it and they thought it was interesting
and I started getting requests for those necklaces.
There's just something in how it made me feel inside
and how I felt working with those materials
and thinking in that way, like these little mini sculptures.
And that's not a way I had ever really thought before
and I really just felt myself so compelled by it.
Typically, when I have the castings and I have the stones,
it goes into production essentially,
and that means that it's getting made and being assembled.
We gather the stones and then we move them to our setter.
There's nothing like working with somebody who's,
you know, a master at working with their hands.
It's precious metals,
it's precious materials, it's soft stones,
we need technical masters to be able to do this work
and that's what makes it fine jewelry.
So once that we get that seated in there,
we can hammer the wall over, make the stone tight.
Our setter will receive those stones,
those loose stones and our rough castings
and he will actually go to the process
of buffing 'em up a little bit,
pre-polishing so that they're easier to work with.
And those castings are actually really rough at this point,
they're gold, but they're not at all polished
and he'll actually do some pre-polishing
so that they're easier to work with.
And he uses sandpaper, he has a rubber wheel,
just things to clean it up a bit.
Once that's all done,
he'll start to get ready to set that stone into that piece.
So he uses a shellac stick,
and he makes it to the exact right shape
of the thing we are working on.
Get it nice and gooey so it sticks,
and we'll put it in place.
Now it's prepared for us to put the stone in.
Then after that casting is secured,
he'll actually start setting the stone,
and what he wants to do is take a little bit of that bezel,
and like get a little lip of it over each stone
so he uses a micro hammer.
Once the stone is secured,
there's some cleanup that has to happen
because of all that hammering
so he actually uses a tool that, it's like an engraving tool
that cleans the wall of the bezel,
and he actually has a way of buffing it
so he can buff out all of those like hammer marks.
They're small but they're there
so gotta clean those marks up.
Once all these pieces are put together,
we then connect those jump rings
to make the earring like a whole piece and complete.
And then, finally, we actually do a final polish
to make the gold really beautiful and and sparkly.
Hi. How you doing?
Good to see you.
After production is over and the earrings are done,
they come back to me and I inspect them
and just get to see the final thing
and make sure it's what I had in my mind.
Oh, that's so pretty, very clean, very nice.
I love how the colors came together,
I like that interplay of opaque versus transparent.
We call these a totem earring
because I think there's something totem-esque about them,
the way that they are these things
that are stacked up on top of each other
in these different and interesting shapes and colors.
Thank you, Set. You're welcome,
it was my pleasure.
I think designing jewelry has taught me
to really trust myself.
It's really, it's been an interesting process
because you truly are making something
for people to buy, a specific thing,
and when people get excited about that
and connect to it, it's validating
in the sense that you're like,
oh wow, you know, I'm not crazy,
this thing that I think is cool
is cool and interesting to someone else too.
I have always been interested in philanthropy.
There's just something about making something
that's so, you know, it's such a luxury good,
it's expensive, there's all these things,
and yet the reality in our world
is that there are people suffering and and hurting.
And so, I felt like I had this unique opportunity
to take those luxury goods that people were coveting
and actually turn that into money
that I could donate back to these organizations.
So I actually donate a hundred percent of the profits
from the Charity Hearts, is the collection that I call it.
And I don't know, there's this interesting collection
of people who seem to be getting behind it, which is cool.
Kamala Harris wearing my NAACP heart was super cool.
I chose the NAACP as the charity that I wanted to donate to
'cause I believe in the work that they're doing,
especially from a legal standpoint
and how important that is to create,
you know, an environment
where black justice actually comes to fruition.
Hilary Swank, Blake Lively actually did a lot
to promote the heart for Everytown for Gun Safety,
so did Julianne Moore.
The last one I just introduced
is for Everytown for Gun Safety.
And as a mother and a human and just a person who,
you know, values safety and wants everyone to be safe,
I think we need to have common sense gun laws.
I think that giving back is just something that,
again, that I've believed in for a really long time
and this feels to me like the right way to do it.
I know that the stuff that I make
is not something that everyone can afford,
and then I actually try to price
these particular pieces to be very approachable
for within the fine jewelry luxury world,
so that I can sell, you know,
as many of them as I can and be able to donate that money.
I feel like creating and designing really brings me
into the thing I feel like I'm supposed to be doing,
and there's something about that that's really satisfying
and I just feel like I'm a part of something bigger
when I'm doing that work.