As a young girl, Carina Hardy spent much of her childhood in Bali, surrounded by rings, bracelets and necklaces: Her father is the jewelry designer John Hardy and her mother, Cynthia Hardy, was then overseeing his self-named brand. But following in her parents’ footsteps wasn’t always part of her plan.
“Honestly, it was a total accident,” she said, speaking by phone from her home on the outskirts of Ubud, a Balinese town about 700 miles southeast of Jakarta. “I didn’t go into jewelry thinking that was what I was going to do since I was a kid.”
Nonetheless, Ms. Hardy, 29, has been designing and selling jewelry since she was in her early twenties. And last year, she founded the Carina Hardy brand with Tavish Gallagher, 36, her personal and professional partner.
The Carina Hardy brand has two tiers: a demi fine collection, with items such as drop earrings in silver or gold vermeil with tiny pink pearls, and a higher-end fine jewelry collection with more luxurious items, including a 18-karat gold cuff with sculpted figures depicting Venus curled around its edge. Some pieces were inspired by classical works of art, such as a large 18-karat gold ring that depicts three women in the style of a neoclassical sculpture ($12,950); many pieces have natural inspirations from Bali, including lily pads and drops of flowing water.
Prices for the lower-end items range from $70 for silver stud earrings that look like tiny lotus flowers to $800 for the 18-inch Showers Necklace in 22-karat gold vermeil adorned with small moonstones and pearls. The higher-end line starts with the Daughter ring, a thin 18-karat band set with pearls that sells for $800, and rises to an 18-karat gold Pavé Coil bracelet pavéd with brown diamonds and yellow sapphires, priced at $24,500.
Some designs, such as the Daughter ring, have female-driven themes. “I’ve always felt really close to women as a source of inspiration in my life,” Ms. Hardy said.
That feeling also fuels the brand’s overall aesthetic. “There’s a delicateness to her work that is very feminine,” said Beth Buccini, the owner of the American fashion boutiques Kirna Zabête, which have been carrying Ms. Hardy’s fine jewelry pieces since May 2024. “It’s very discreet in many ways, like the way she’s got the little hidden pearls. There’s a softness to it but a real romanticism to it as well.”
The brand also is sold at boutiques including 180 the Store in New York City and Back 40 Mercantile in Old Greenwich, Conn., as well as Balinese luxury hotels such as Amankila, Amandari, Como Shambhala Estate and Bambu Indah, which her parents opened in 2012. (The Hardys sold their brand, known for its intricate Balinese-made woven silver jewelry, in 2007; it now is owned by L Catterton, a private equity company that purchased it in 2014.)
Ms. Hardy and Mr. Gallagher declined to disclose their company’s annual revenue.The couple say they design the pieces together, a process that can involve sketching, molding clay or marking up slabs of wax with their ideas. They say that everything is handmade on Bali, where the brand has an in-house wax carver and works with a workshop in Celuk Village, a hub of traditional jewelry making. (Gemstones are set in Bangkok.)
“Bali has such rich craftsmen,” Mr. Gallagher said. Many are skilled in crafts that have been practiced in their families for generations. “It really is the reason that we’re able to create what we create.”
Many of the brand’s pieces display those techniques. Take the zodiac pendants: Each image is sculpted onto a silver disc with a soft, slightly imprecise circular silhouette, unmistakably the product of a hand-carved mold.
“They have their own look, but they’re backing it up with the hand,” John Hardy, Ms. Hardy’s father, said in a recent phone interview. “I see a lot of stuff now being made that never touches a hand — that’s a thing on a computer screen that goes to a 3-D printer. They’re using artisans.”
Brands with that type of craftsmanship especially resonate with consumers who are looking for distinctive pieces, experts say.
“There’s certainly an appeal for easy-to produce jewelry — walking into a mall and walking out with a piece of jewelry — but when you talk about more special pieces, they tend to be handmade,” said David J. Bonaparte, the president and chief executive of Jewelers of America, a trade organization, of which the John Hardy brand is a member.
In addition to their design collaboration, Ms. Hardy and Mr. Gallagher work together on all aspects of the business. They met in 2018 on the dating app Hinge; he moved to Bali the following year and they began working together, eventually starting the Carina Hardy brand. (Earlier Mr. Gallagher had spent several years running a home contracting business with his brother that operated in New York City and Berkshire County in Massachusetts.)
While he does not have any formal design training, he said his love of jewelry stretched back to childhood, from trying on his mother’s clip-on earrings as a young boy to buying inexpensive fake silver chains on Canal Street in New York as a teenager. As he put it, “I always adorned myself.”
For similarly minded male consumers, the brand plans to introduce a collection of men’s items called Chasm this week.
As for Ms. Hardy, she earned a bachelor’s degree in art history with a concentration in the visual arts from Barnard College in 2018. During her college years, she studied for a time at Goldsmiths, the University of London, where she began to design hammered magnetic brooches resembling a woman’s nipple. She sold them, and other pieces, under the name Elppin — the reverse spelling of the word nipple. (A variety of pieces along those lines are included in her current collection.)
When it came time to name the new brand, however, Ms. Hardy said that decision was simple. “When you look at a lot of big names, especially in luxury and fashion, they’re mostly all eponymous with few exceptions.”
Still, given her father’s name recognition, the decision had more baggage than it might have for a typical brand. “It takes a lot of gumption and a lot of courage to do that,” Ms. Hardy’s mother, Cynthia, said in a phone interview.
But, she noted later in the interview, “She really just wants to be Carina Hardy.”
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