Six-and-a-half years into building her brand, Claudia Kronfeld is candid about the path that got her here. Bench-trained but self-taught in design, she spent her early years (in New York and Philadelphia) quietly correcting what she calls “classical design errors” — the kind a formal education might have caught sooner. What has since emerged through her fine jewellery brand, Claudia Mae, is something more instinctive, and by her own account, only now fully in focus. “I feel like I’ve really hit my stride in terms of what elements of design are really signature to the brand,” says the designer based in West Palm Beach, Florida. Chief among them is a burnished setting technique borrowed from Victorian gypsy rings, modernised across her Nomad collection and now woven through everything she makes in 14k gold with a high polish or matte finish.
Custom orders, she adds, can be rendered in 18k gold. This season, that signature meets a new idea; jewellery not as a single static object, but as an interchangeable system. “We can’t buy jewellery anymore that is just static, to be used only in one way,” Claudia explains.
Bails were resized to match the inner diameter of her story beads, a detail she calls minor but transformative; clasps were rebuilt to connect chains, leathers and beads interchangeably, so a bracelet becomes a necklace, or two. It is a deliberately mixed-media philosophy, pairing a heavy gold chain with raw leather cord. “What a cool juxtaposition that is,” she adds, “mixed materials of high and low, fine and less fine.”
The Charm Keepers capsule channels that thinking most literally, inspired by the sound and ritual of an actual keychain is “both function and expression of whatever it is that I liked and wanted to carry with me.”
Soft- edged and curvy, the keepers come in two sizes, their bails embellished with the same burnished stones found throughout her story beads. A horseshoe-shaped earring extends the idea further, a subtle nod to her equestrian background, paired with a barbell bangle that first allowed her story beads to be worn beyond the necklace.
Meaningful Markers, for now, begins with letters — sculptural, curved, set with burnished stones across four styles, including a double-piercing detail the designer first developed for Calico scallop shells sourced from the West Coast of Florida from in her Seaborne collection. “It’s where we pierced the shell and put a jump ring through it, so it looks almost like the shell had an earring,” she says of the technique’s origin — one a client’s request for a piece, made entirely on the spot, eventually launched into its own corner of the brand. The letters’ rounded, almost balloon-like form was not a literal reference, she explains, but an extension of the same soft curvature found throughout her rings.
Colour, unsurprisingly, drives her Color Forms, where cabochons meet faceted stones in pieces trimmed with what Claudia calls fringe — petals or spikes of texture surrounding the central stone without distracting from it.
“Cabochons are all about colour,” she says. “It’s a cut that’s meant to highlight colour, not sparkle.” The mix of cut and texture, she adds, is where she finds herself most often drawn to lately. Across several pieces in the collection, she introduces a spiked, stubble-like texture along the edges of her settings — a rougher but tactile counterpoint to the rounded forms that otherwise define her work. In bordered pendants set with green or purple tourmalines, opal and tanzanite, the effect reads almost like a second piercing. It is a small but deliberate contrast, Claudia points out.
Diamond Droplets marks a deliberate shift; a diamond-forward design in a line long defined by colour. Here, the diamonds sit slightly offset in irregular, pebble-like forms, burnished rather than bezel-set, a technique she notes is notoriously difficult to execute cleanly in fancy shapes. “That’s not a skill set that your average jeweller can do,” Claudia says, crediting a small team of specialists in Philadelphia, New York and Thailand for the work.
Across every capsule, the aesthetic is the same — jewellery made to be layered, rearranged and personalised in a myriad way.