Kora Cuff

Amy with Master Carver, Tongo Léon Kayenya

Kora’s socially and aesthetically conscious philosophy brings the beauty of unique jewelry to a new light. Kora avidly supports sustainability of local businesses in developing countries by taking discarded horns thrown out by butchers and metamorphosing them into beautiful pieces of jewelry and teaching the people of Rwanda valuable business skills.

In developing Kora’s website, we chose full screen images of the exquisite jewelry pieces as a background display for each page. Built using a Content Management System (CMS), the website is easily accessible to update new products and content seamlessly. As our client was in Africa during the development phase of website, our transcontinental correspondence via Skype proved to be quite successful.

For more details in Kora’s philosphy and design of the unique jewelry pieces, visit koradesigns.com.

Crawfish Bracelet by Nicholas Varney

Quahog Pearl Earrings by Nicholas Varney

We deal with a lot of jewelry clients, each with a unique product and point of view. It’s exciting to express that point of view for every client. However, we were especially thrilled when we were approached by Nicholas Varney to design his website. His larger-than-life personality is something that translates into his jewelry, and even that might be putting it lightly.

With pieces that should be hanging in a museum rather than on earlobes, Nicholas creates masterpieces that take inspiration from nature. He has the power to transform the mundane crawfish (or any other little critter) into an exorbitant and bejeweled sculpture. His idiosyncratic approach to jewelry design was an easy source of inspiration for us. Taking cues from his conceptual sketches, which are beautiful in their own right, we created a website design that captured the process of his beautiful work. We took his artistic craftsmanship and little organic pieces of art and injected it with some very modern web technologies to create a site that was highly charming and functional.

The entire site is built with a Content Management System (CMS) which allows for easy updating. It offers another advantage we have been dying to use. Nicholas can assign customers like Bergdorf Goodman a login to his site so they can see a special inventory list not available to the rest of the viewing audience. So the site not only acts as a beautiful gallery of his portfolio, but as a practical business tool as well.

Click Here to view the new Nicholas Varney site.

The holidays are always a busy time for us, but we still manage to the find time to party down. And last night, we attended the New York debut of Kora’s beautiful jewelry. Based in Rwanda, Kora is all about merging jewelry design with socially-minded economic development. Part of the profit from each amazing piece made from horn goes back to the community. We are super excited to work with clients like Kora who care deeply about a greater cause. And we also love hanging out at fancy parties. A perfect match! Here are a few snapshots captured between saying hello to some of the fabulous guests and trying on the jewelry. Love those rings!

Close up of the Jewelry

View of the Loft

View from the Loft!

Now that the party is over, we are looking forward to helping them with their branding and more in the near future!