One afternoon this spring, Rony Elka Vardi and Leigh Batnick Plessner stood outside the storefront on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where their jewelry boutique Catbird was located for years. The cramped space, now a café serving coffee and Argentinian pastries, spans just over 200 square meters.
“It’s small even for a coffee shop,” says Ms. Vardi, 54.
Catbird opened at that location in 2006, about two years after Ms. Vardi started the business. But over the course of a decade, it outgrew the small shop. In 2022, Ms. Vardi and Ms. Batnick Plessner began selling Catbird’s selection of small, layered jewelry in a nearby space in Williamsburg, about 10 times its size. By then they had also opened a store in downtown Manhattan; Last year they opened a second one, in Rockefeller Center.
Locations in Boston, Los Angeles and Washington came soon after. There are plans to open a store in San Francisco in August, and Catbird aims to open 10 more locations in places like Atlanta and Chicago by 2026, further expanding the national footprint of what has largely remained a cult brand.
When you walk into a Catbird store, you enter a world where jewelry and fashionable trinkets from the brand and other makers are displayed alongside fancy trappings like starched white lace curtains, antique furniture, overgrown houseplants and smoky, slightly crooked mirrors.
Ms. Batnick Plessner, 45, the company’s chief creative officer, said the brand’s aesthetic subtly straddles the line between “trash and treasure.”
When Catbird was founded in 2004, these pillars of identity could also be used to describe Williamsburg. At the time, the area was in the process of transforming from an industrial district into a trendy destination known around the world.
Chris DeCrosta, co-founder of the commercial real estate firm GoodSpace, which has helped bring companies like Apple and Supreme to the area, said Catbird was among a handful of brands “that made people want to come to Williamsburg to shop.” He added that most of his contemporaries stores like Bird and Gentry – “does not exist anymore.” (Catbird’s Williamsburg store is now in the space previously occupied by Gentry.)
Catbird may have benefited from riding the wave of modern Williamsburg’s popularity, but it has endured by being a gateway to the world of fine jewelry for many millennials and Gen Z customers. The ornate pieces made from recycled 14-karat gold and other luxury materials are often priced lower than jewelry made from non-precious metals sold by some designer brands.
Catbird jewelry is considered semi-fine, a style that “bridges the gap between desire and accessibility,” says Sam Broekema, editor-in-chief of Only Natural Diamonds, a website and magazine published by the Natural Diamond Council. Younger demi-fine jewelry companies include Stone and Strand, Mejuri and AUrate. Mr Broekema said Catbird is “the OG”.
The idea for Catbird came to Ms. Vardi in the early 2000s, not long after she moved to Brooklyn in 1999. She worked at the cosmetics company Bliss and had about $16,000 in savings. Williamsburg’s much cheaper rents at the time made the neighborhood a good place to pursue “personal projects,” as she put it. It would be a boutique selling jewelry, clothing, stationery and home goods from various small brands.
“There were very few places to shop,” Ms Vardi said.
Shortly after founding Catbird, she decided to focus on selling jewelry. She was drawn to pieces with small proportions and a certain handmade charm, from brands like Digby & Iona and Elisa Solomon, which Catbird has been selling since its early days.
“I have always loved small jewelry because I am generally a no-nonsense person,” Ms. Vardi said.
Other items Catbird sold at the time included products from a greeting card company founded by Ms. Batnick Plessner, who first met Ms. Vardi in 2005. She joined the Catbird staff later that year and has been Ms. Vardi’s close colleague since 2008 . -equal creative partner in the business.
The women have brought products to market by leaning heavily on the personal relationship people can have with jewelry. Part of Ms. Batnick Plessner’s job is to come up with lyrical names for Catbird pieces — such as Dewdrop, for a small stud earring — to make them more appealing.
“It’s the idea of, ‘What can it do to someone’s emotional center?’” she said.
Catbird also uses the scale of its jewelry as a selling point, sometimes promoting its baubles as “the smallest.” The Dewdrop button ($128 each), one of the most popular styles, places a two-millimeter-wide pearl next to an even smaller diamond, both held in place by 14-karat gold prongs not much larger than grains of sand .
A significant portion of Catbird’s own line has always been made in Brooklyn; first at factories in Williamsburg, and now at the Brooklyn Navy Yard near Fort Greene, where the company moved its headquarters and manufacturing facilities in 2018.
From July 2023 to June 2024, Catbird sold approximately 350,000 units of its own line; about half were made at the Navy Yard. Joel Weiss, owner of Carrera Casting in Manhattan’s Diamond District, which develops jewelry with Catbird and other brands such as David Yurman, Judith Ripka and Costco, called Catbird a “monster.” He said he couldn’t think of another company that produces a greater number of pieces in New York City.
Ms. Vardi and Ms. Batnick Plessner said there was a sign that Catbird had penetrated certain taste-making crowds in 2012, when some fashion observers noticed that a ring it had been selling — was a gold band. intended to be worn over the first knuckle of a finger – might have inspired the jewelry during a Chanel haute couture fashion show.
“That was one of the first inklings that it was more than a small store,” Ms. Batnick Plessner said.
Since then, Catbird pieces have been tagged in countless TikTok videos and worn by Taylor Swift and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Collaborations with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, J. Crew, musicians like Phoebe Bridgers and actresses like Jenny Slate have also helped raise its profile.
On a Sunday in April, shoppers in Boston walked in and out of the Catbird store that opened on Newbury Street in December. Not everyone was aware of the company’s roots in Brooklyn. Some had come for gifts; others, to be “zapped” – a service, starting at $98, in which chain bracelets are laser-soldered to customers’ wrists at specialized stalls within the store.
The nationwide expansion of Catbird, which has about 234 employees and generates nearly 60 percent of its annual sales online, has been led in part by a relatively new CEO, Motoko Sakurai, who joined the company about two years ago. Ms. Vardi has ended her day-to-day involvement with the company; she now mainly does creative work with Ms. Batnick Plessner.
Catbird’s store expansion was funded in part by a round of private equity investments from backers including Victor Capital Partners. Ms. Sakurai, Ms. Vardi and Ms. Batnick Plessner declined to disclose the amount of private equity financing Catbird has received. Dave Affinito, a partner at Victor Capital Partners, declined to disclose the size of the firm’s investment in an email. But he said he has been a fan of the company for a while and that “more people deserve to have the Catbird experience.”
Ms. Sakurai, 50, who goes by Mo, previously held executive positions at David Yurman and The Frye Company. She acknowledged that opening stores across the country comes with risks. “My biggest goal is to maintain the authenticity of the brand and grow it in a thoughtful way,” she said.
Carolyn Rafaelian, whose popular jewelry company Alex and Ani undertook an ambitious expansion, funded by private equity investments, only to crater and ultimately file for bankruptcy, understood the desire to expand Catbird’s physical footprint. “At some point it is harmful to a brand if it is not physically present,” she says.
Ms. Rafaelian, who left Alex and Ani as the business declined and has since founded other jewelry brands such as &Livy, added that Catbird’s business model has positioned the company to weather growing pains.
“Anyone can create ideas and send them abroad to be made, but they are artisans,” she said. “It’s part of their story. You don’t just buy a piece of jewelry.”
