For more than a quarter of its 80-year history, the Brazilian jeweler HStern has reached for the stars. Repeatedly.
A design throughline since its Stars collection debuted in 2004, starry themes have been a focus of at least 15 collections — including the Copernicus, Genesis and Gravity lines, and the brand’s latest, an ode to meteors called Star Fragments.
On a recent video call from HStern’s headquarters in the Ipanema neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro, Roberto Stern, the company’s president and artistic director, explained the stellar fascination. “In English, ‘stern’ means something rigid or the back of a boat,” he said. “But in German, it means ‘star.’”
For the brand’s 21st-century fans, jewels that evoke the cosmos are its calling card. But for an older generation of Brazilians and international visitors, HStern — the namesake of its founder, Hans Stern, who established the business in 1945 after emigrating to Rio from Germany — is synonymous with colored stones, especially those mined in Brazil (such as aquamarine, quartz and tourmaline).
Father to Son
“At the very beginning, my father saw the value in colored gemstones,” Roberto Stern said. “People used to value diamonds, rubies, sapphires and emeralds. And all the rest was considered semiprecious, like traveling second class. He wanted to convey that colored gemstones are not semiprecious. They are precious.”
Hans Stern, who remained active in the company until his death in 2007, built the business on gems, which he treated like artwork. The settings created by the brand’s workshops were simply their frames.
In the past 30 years, however, Roberto, the eldest of Hans’s four sons and the only one still working at the company, has steered HStern in a design-driven direction.
The influences of both the father and son have shaped the brand — which now operates 70 HStern stores worldwide, across Brazil as well as in Argentina, Israel, Mexico, Peru, Russia and the United States — into one of the country’s best known luxury exports.
“HStern created a culture of Brazilian fine jewelry that could be recognized internationally,” Andrea Hansen, the founder and chief executive of Luxe Intelligence, a luxury branding and business development agency in Seattle, said on a video interview in October. “No one did that before HStern actually put the flag out there, and said, ‘We’re from Brazil and we’re proud of it.’”
Ms. Hansen should know. A native of Rio, she was 15 years old in December 1985 when she took a summer job as a guide at the HStern workshop in Ipanema.
“This was before headphones,” she recalled. “We were taught to give a 15-minute tour of the mining production process in multiple languages to all of the foreign visitors.”
(The company, which began workshop tours in 1951, now estimates that some two million people have visited since its move in the early 1980s to Ipanema from the original downtown location. An adjacent gemological exhibition features Hans Stern’s personal collection of tourmalines in more than 1,000 shades.)
Ms. Hansen went on to spend 24 years at HStern, both in Brazil and New York, where she worked on branding, marketing, business development and global public relations strategy. She and Roberto Stern, who joined the company in 1984, were contemporaries.
“Roberto was always more focused on the design aspect of things, in building a brand, in being more than just about colored gemstones,” she said.
Partner Track
Indeed, it was Mr. Stern’s tenure as executive vice president, from 1994 to 2007, that marked a turning point for the business.
“I was transferred to São Paulo, and there were no tourists — it was only the local market,” he said. “So I started to work without gems. I started to work around creating a design identity. I didn’t know anything about design, and I didn’t have a formal education in design or even jewelry.” (The brand said that Mr. Stern briefs the design team on his ideas, overseeing their development, and is involved in the day-to-day creation and manufacture of every piece.)
The brand’s 50th anniversary celebration in 1995 provided an occasion for Mr. Stern to showcase his vision with the HStern World Collection of 18-karat gold designs set with a smattering of gems such as diamonds, blue topaz, rock crystal, citrine and amethyst.
Introduced simultaneously in all brand stores worldwide, the collection was subdivided into 14 lines labeled with women’s names — including Giuliana, Paola and Justine. Distinguished by clean lines, organic shapes and hidden details, such as small stones placed inside the pieces that were intended to delight only the wearer, the collection, Mr. Stern said, was an early entrant in what jewelers later came to call the women’s self-purchase category.
In 1997, Mr. Stern decided to look beyond the company for design inspiration, asking Costanza Pascolato, a Brazilian style consultant, to create a collection of gold pieces with elevated finishes like those used in haute couture.
“I did it for the creative challenge,” Mr. Stern said. “When you work with an artist that never worked with jewelry before, you get a different vision.”
The success of that collaboration begot more partnerships, earning HStern a reputation for teaming with some of Brazil’s best-known artists, dancers and creatives, including Grupo Corpo, a contemporary dance company; the brothers Fernando and Humberto Campana, furniture designers in São Paulo; and Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian Modernist architect with whom HStern created two collections, first in 2008 and again in 2013.
Mr. Stern recounted an early conversation he had with Mr. Niemeyer. “His work is a derivation of Brutalism — it’s rounded, but it has a lot of concrete,” he said. “I said to him, ‘How am I going to transform your concrete into jewelry?’ And he said, ‘Look at my sketches.’ And we did it based on the sketches, so it came out organically.”
In 2004, the company reached beyond Brazil’s borders to introduce designs created with Diane von Furstenberg, the New York designer whose 1970s wrap dress became a symbol of female liberation (and who recently was feted in New York as an Icon of Culture).
In a recent phone interview from New York, Ms. von Furstenberg recalled what led her to work with the company. “I’m a big jewelry collector: antique jewelry, Indian jewelry, I love jewelry,” she said. “And I noticed years back the quality of the jewelry that HStern was making and I was very impressed. I tried desperately to seduce Hans and it never went anywhere and I had to wait until he retired and then I seduced his son.”
The boldness of the collections — including a follow-up line in 2010 called Sutras that featured rock crystal jewels inspired by Indian designs — resonated with Mr. Stern and led to an enduring friendship with Ms. von Furstenberg.
“He was a dream to work with,” she said, “because he was as bold as the jewelry.”
It has been more than 20 years since the collaboration was introduced, but Ms. von Furstenberg said she still wears its signature pieces. “The Sutra bracelet was incredible,” she said. “I actually recently bought one at The RealReal so I have more than one.
“It’s totally my style of jewelry,” she added. “I love big jewelry. But it’s because of the quality — absolutely because of the quality.”
While HStern’s latest collection, Sky Fragments — a range of polished and rough-hewn designs that look like gold nuggets, sprinkled with diamonds and emeralds — was not a collaboration, it also has all the hallmarks of the brand’s design ethos: bold styles rendered in 18-karat gold.
“Sky fragments are meteors — the stones of space,” Mr. Stern said. “We did them in gold. Being a rock, it relates to my father.”
From A.I. to Eternity
As Mr. Stern looks to the future, and the company’s 100th anniversary, he hopes that the company’s 1,200 employees see the arrival of his daughter, Carolina, 27, as a sign of the brand’s longevity. “Just the fact of her being here is a message: ‘Yes, we are going to be around,’” he said.
Ms. Stern, a project manager, splits her time between the headquarters in Rio and the company’s facility in São Paulo and has been working on two major projects, one involving the company’s new production system and the other integrating artificial intelligence into its design process.
“My father has always been an A.I. enthusiast,” Ms. Stern said on a video interview in October from the company’s headquarters. “When ChatGPT came out, every day, he would email me: ‘Did you use A.I. today?’”
Ms. Stern acknowledged that when she was younger, she had resisted the idea of joining the family business (“I very strongly wanted to build my own path,” she said). But she has since come around.
“When I decided to work here, me and my dad agreed that I would be here for six months and if I didn’t like it, after that, I could leave,” she said. “And after the six months, he asked me, ‘What are you thinking? Are you going to leave?’ And I’m like, ‘I’m never leaving. I love it here.’”
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