From Antique Lockets to The Today Show and Beyond with Luna & Stella Suzanne Ellis Wernevi

Spirit of 608: Fashion, Entrepreneurship, Sustainability + Tech

Sometimes you fall in love with vintage, and sometimes you fall so hard you start a business. The latter is the case for this week’s guest, who launched a line of jewelry born out of her love for antique lockets and went on to grow the company into a mixed collection of modern fine jewelry pieces and unique antique jewelry from her network of sources.

In this week’s episode, we get the inside story of Suzanne’s journey from the corporate world (she’s an alum of J.Crew, RedEnvelope, Victoria’s Secret and Bally) to launching her collection and growing it for more than a decade. Along the way, she’s learned a lot — including how to get featured in major media from the Today Show to the New York Times.

Listen in for her advice on the business of building a business and so much more.

Featured in this episode:

Suzanne Wernevi

Linkedin: Suzanne Ellis Wernevi

Meet Suzanne Wernevi:

Suzanne Wernevi is the founder of Luna & Stella, a Providence-based jewelry business that blends their own contemporary heirlooms with one-of-a-kind antiques.

Luna & Stella was born out of the 2008 recession. At the time, she was leading merchandising for a venture-backed e-commerce company that went bankrupt. Employees lost their livelihoods and health insurance overnight. The next day, it was her job to call the vendors, many of them small business owners, to tell them their invoices would not be paid. She saw firsthand the human impact of what can happen when a company prioritizes rapid growth over financial sustainability. And she knew there had to be a better way.

Throughout her career in corporate fashion, she had worked with many product categories -- but jewelry resonated with her for its timeless quality and emotional significance.

In 2009, she launched Luna & Stella in New York with the idea of creating fine jewelry symbolic of one’s closet relationships – the treasured “moon and stars” in our lives. It gained early traction, but by 2011, she and her husband were looking for a more livable city. They saw the potential for a great quality of life in Providence -- a university town with great food, culture, diversity, affordable homes, and access to the outdoors. From a business perspective, she was drawn to Rhode Island’s history as the jewelry capital of the world and hoped to manufacture lockets based on ones that were made there over a century ago. But she found that modern tooling and techniques could not replicate the craftsmanship of Rhode Island’s past.

Instead, she discovered that people were drawn to the history and one-of-a-kind nature of the antique pieces themselves. At the same time, she was becoming increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of jewelry production -- and vintage jewelry, which does not further deplete natural resources, fit perfectly into a growing movement for sustainable fashion.

You can learn more about Suzanne and her company at www.lunaandstella.com.

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