CaratWoodley wears the Frida: HOWL's $98,000 collar goes campaigning
Miami jeweler HOWL — Handle Only With Love — debuts its Home Sweet Home campaign with Shailene Woodley in the Frida collar: 13 hand-carved Venetian glass pieces and 3.08 carats of old European-cut diamonds in 18-karat gold.
§1A manifesto in glass and gold.
The campaign is called Home Sweet Home, and the home in question is Miami. HOWL — the one-of-a-kind jewelry house whose name abbreviates Handle Only With Love — debuted the campaign on July 8 with actress Shailene Woodley photographed by Robin Harper, wearing pieces from a collection founder Tini Courtney drew from the Art Deco hotel architecture of her hometown. Courtney has been designing for fifteen years; this is the brand's most visible swing yet.
§2Attention is the distribution.
The centerpiece is the Frida collar, and it is a manifesto in object form: thirteen hand-carved Venetian glass elements in varied colors, set in 18-karat yellow gold with 3.08 carats of old European-cut diamonds, priced at $98,000. The wider collection runs the same unconventional register — Venetian glass alongside emeralds, sapphires, diamonds and pearls — and sells the way HOWL always has: direct, through its own site and social channels, one piece per design. Woodley, for her part, said she was "completely gobsmacked by what she created."
The store is wherever the image travels.
As strategy, the celebrity campaign solves the specific problem of the one-of-a-kind house. A brand with no wholesale doors and no repeatable SKUs cannot buy distribution; it can only buy attention and convert it. A recognizable face in a $98,000 collar is a reach engine pointed at the small population that buys artist jewelry — the same logic that has independent houses taking storefronts on Mount Street and Wooster Street rather than counters in department stores. The store is wherever the image travels.
§3Authorship is the scarce stone.
The material choice is the more interesting bet. Putting hand-carved glass beside old-cut diamonds — and pricing the result near six figures — is a wager that provenance of hand now outranks preciousness of material at the top of the market. In a year when lab-grown supply has made carats cheap and getting cheaper, the scarce commodity is authorship, and HOWL is pricing authorship the way other houses price stones.
Glass next to old-cut diamonds is a statement about where value lives — when the material bill is a fraction of the price, you are buying the hand, and the hand is the one thing a reactor cannot commoditize.
Expect more houses to campaign on craft as stone margins thin; the ones who do it convincingly will discover, as HOWL is betting, that a story carved by hand outsells a certificate.
The trade, filed to your inbox before the New York open.
Prices, tenders and the one story that moved the industry overnight — read in ninety seconds.
Subscribe free →Ten years from Kyiv to Wooster Street: Guzema opens in SoHo
Another independent choosing its own doorway over department stores.