Emily Kuvin’s approach to design

By Tina Snyder

Emily Kuvin

Emily Kuvin Jewelry Design
New York City

Emily Kuvin has always prided herself on being a sharp observer of the world around her. It’s no surprise her knack for taking in gobs of information and distilling it down to the essence landed her in a journalism career after college. Today, those same characteristics define her approach to jewelry design.

“I don’t walk down the street thinking about jewelry design, it’s more of a subconscious thing,” she explains. “I take in shapes, colors, history, and architecture, and ruminate on things. For example, I’m inspired by the simple shapes in ancient architecture—arches, pyramids, circles, triangles—and how they intersect.”

A passion of hers since high school, designing jewelry is now a full-time job for Kuvin, who left the corporate world in Boston five years ago and now lives in New York City, where she can pursue her love of jewelry design more easily. She is the winner of the 2020 MJSA Online Design Challenge, an annual competition that presents nine jewelry designers with a fictitious scenario and challenges them to design a piece of custom jewelry for the client using their sentimental gems or heirlooms within a defined budget.

“You’d think being able to do whatever you want with a custom design is easier, but it’s so vast and limitless that it can actually be paralyzing. Parameters make the work easier.”

Having worked on many commissioned jewelry pieces, Kuvin is comfortable with custom design work—and, in fact, she appreciates when a project has some set parameters. “You’d think being able to do whatever you want with a custom design is easier, but it’s so vast and limitless that it can actually be paralyzing,” she explains. “Parameters make the work easier. Think of it as being stuck in your house during a blizzard with three things in your refrigerator. You are forced to be creative with those ingredients, and the results are often incredibly satisfying.”

For the MJSA Online Design Challenge, Kuvin wanted to incorporate the recipient Maria’s life story into the jewelry piece. Working with the provided 26 mm Mabe pearl from the Sea of Cortez—a tribute to Maria’s home country of Mexico—and 12 Montana sapphires—an ode to her obtaining citizenship status in the U.S.—Kuvin decided to design a necklace. “It provides me the biggest canvas to incorporate all of the story and still be subtle about it,” she says.

For Kuvin, custom jewelry is never in-dicating, but rather a subtle conveyance of emotions, milestones, or connections. In Maria’s necklace, the yellow gold mesh represents a fishing net to honor her hometown and her father; the pearl anchors the piece in both her Mexican heritage and her personal strength; the sapphires symbolize her precious children; and the V-shaped clasp honors the memory of her late husband, Vicente. (Read the entire story here.)

Kuvin’s approach to custom design is always to listen to the client, ask the right questions, and note the important elements. For example, if a client brings her a piece of Grandma’s jewelry to transform into something more wearable, she may ask, What was special about your relationship with your grandmother? Do you remember her wearing this and how she wore it? What are your favorite pieces to wear? And she’ll base her design ideas on those answers.

If a client simply presents her with a stone he or she purchased and wants to make it into a piece of jewelry, she may ask questions such as, Do you have a budget? What type of jewelry would you like to make with this stone(s)? Do you want a suite of jewels, or just one signature piece? Would you like something you can wear every day or just for special occasions? The answers to these questions help to inform her approach.

Frequently, clients give Kuvin free rein to design whatever she’d like. “In these cases, very often the custom design ends up as a seed for a new collection,” she admits.

This was the case with her Jubilation collection, which was born from a commission for a pair of earrings made with the client’s mother-in-law’s diamonds. “She had inherited a number of diamonds simply broken out of a channel-set bracelet that her mother-in-law wore,” says Kuvin. “After exploring her taste in jewelry, which was very contemporary, I decided to design a pair of earrings, which became the first of the Jubilation collection. I was so excited about the earrings I ended up creating them in colored stones, and the collection was born.”

When it comes to designing her line, Kuvin says she sets aside a few hours of uninterrupted design time each week to sketch. She works with gel markers to sketch shapes and colors she finds pleasing until she comes up with a concept she likes. “It usually takes me three to five sketches or iterations to get somewhere I’m willing to try a new idea—and a lot of them end up in the garbage,” she admits.

But for some, such as her Stella collection that features a star-like shape, the sketches just flow. “Once I had the shape for the Stella, it just flowed easily from there, designing different pieces using a combination of those shapes,” she explains. “The shape is what I start with, and most shapes are suited to different pieces.”

Kuvin notes that bracelet designs pose the biggest challenges, while pendants and necklaces come more easily to her, and can be translated into earrings in a variety of styles, including studs, dangling, or larger and smaller versions of a theme.

Whether sketching concepts for a new collection or working on a commission, Kuvin’s journalism background is ever-present. “I love to travel, read books, and just take in the world around me,” she says. “When I sketch, I’m subconsciously synthesizing all the information I take in and coming up with new ideas of my own.”