Around a year ago, the sustainability-minded jewelry brand John Hardy struck up a partnership with Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, to become the brand’s first celebrity ambassadors.
Now, they’re taking that partnership further. John Hardy is releasing two new jewelry collections designed in collaboration with Eilish and O’Connell that tap into the artists’ love of sustainability and offer a more accessible take on John Hardy’s lab-grown diamonds.
The siblings worked with John Hardy designer Reed Krakoff, formerly of Tiffany & Co., to design two collections that reflect Eilish’s music. The Wildflower collection references the softer and more beautiful side of Eilish’s discography, while the Screwball collection reflects the edgier, rock-and-roll side.
Both offer styles priced in a fairly broad range, from $195-$2,400. While John Hardy typically sells products in a similar price range, some pieces can sell for much more, inching up to $50,000 or even $80,000 per piece.
According to Matt Tepper, president of John Hardy, keeping the price point accessible was one of the important factors that Krakoff discussed with Eilish and O’Connell when creating the collection. John Hardy has done a small handful of collaborations in recent years, including one with designer Athena Calderone last year.
“We don’t really do a lot of collabs,” Tepper said. “We’ve done a few here and there, but this is by far our biggest. Billie and Finneas are just such a great fit, and they’re both outspoken advocates for sustainability, which is something that our founder John Hardy made sure was core to the identity when he founded the company 50 years ago.”
The collection uses lab-grown diamonds, a category John Hardy has fully embraced in the last year, though it still sells some mined diamonds. The collection is being promoted with a social campaign developed by creative director Trey Laird — it features both siblings and leveraged Super 8 film. The pair will also post about the collection on their own social channels in the coming days. O’Connell has nearly 5 million Instagram followers, while Eilish has over 123 million. Eilish has also collaborated with Nike and has created a perfume collection with Parlux.
John Hardy’s embrace of lab-grown diamonds and celebrities’ endorsements of those diamonds come at a time when the jewelry industry is split over their use. While brands like John Hardy and Pandora, along with a growing number of consumers, have embraced lab-grown diamonds, motivated by price, availability and sustainability concerns, some legacy companies are digging in their heels on mined diamonds. Lab-grown diamonds now account for nearly half of all engagement ring purchases.
Richemont, for example, is considering buying part of De Beers as it seeks to increase its sourcing of mined diamonds to compete with the rapidly growing lab-grown diamond industry, according to a Reuters report.
“There will always be a market for mined diamonds, but the numbers are clearly favoring lab-grown,” Tepper said. “Most brands are looking at lab-grown as just a way to do a large stone at the same price or a same-size stone at a lower price. We’re trying to think of lab-grown as a new material to work with. That’s why Reed and the team created our own proprietary cut [the JH Lovestruck cut] that we only use for lab-grown diamonds.”
Tepper told Glossy that wholesale makes up most of John Hardy’s business, and the brand has seen particularly strong growth from specialty retailers like Lee Michaels, based in the American South and Southwest, including Texas and New Mexico.
But the Billie and Finneas collections are going to be a primarily DTC offering. Other than its online store and its seven owned stores — two of which are in the U.S. and the rest in Asia — the collection will be a wholesale-exclusive at Nordstrom, one of John Hardy’s largest business partners. John Hardy does over $100 million in annual revenue.
