Leah Belford stands in her airy Gastown office chatting about her latest designs. With her sleek blond bob, vintage Levi’s jeans and casual button-down shirt, she’s every bit as chic as one might imagine her to be.
One quick scroll through her Instagram feed yields a carefully curated stream of beautifully shot and selected images, ranging from close-ups of her delicate designs for her jewelry brand, Leah Alexandra, to snapshots of Belford, stylishly dressed, in stunning locales such as Jaipur, India, Paris and Zion Canyon in Utah.
But, for the self-taught designer, it’s not the clothes, travel and cool locations that excite her the most (although, these things admittedly do) — it’s the gemstones.
“The foundation for all this originated with my love for gemstones. Every idea that I have had for a piece is always about the gemstone,” she says. “There is something magnetic about gemstones. They do have their own energy frequency. And there’s something about — even just from an esthetic standpoint — there’s something that happens when you put them against skin.
“There’s a way that they light you up in a way that a plain metal simply won’t do.”
In fact, it was gemstones that initially drew her to jewelry design. While living in Toronto, Belford recalls how she fell in love with a chunky gemstone necklace featured in the pages of Vogue. The price being too high to buy the piece for herself, she wondered if she could make one like it. After discovering gemstone traders and markets in the area, she began dabbling in design, trying to set about recreating the necklace she so admired.
“It was really one of those making-something-out-of-nothing stories,” she laughs of the hobby that eventually turned into her booming business.
After relocating to Vancouver and taking a job at the jewelry store Blue Ruby (which would eventually become her line’s first retailer), Belford fell back in love with her craft.
“I thought, ‘OK, I need to get this going and turn it into something more than a hobby,’ ” she says. Using the roughly $7,000 that she’d saved up working odd jobs after college, she bought gemstones and other materials to start out.
In addition to reigniting her desire to explore design, her time working at the jewelry store also provided her with valuable insight into what jewelry customers in Vancouver were looking for — and what they were (and weren’t) willing to spend to find it.
“I spent a lot of time working in the jewelry store before I started my business and that really helped me with understanding the end consumer and what the thought process is when they are picking something out,” she says.
Alexandra recalls watching customers make their way around the store, admiring pieces and even trying them on, but then stopping short of actually purchasing them. In the end, she says, it always came down to price.
“The $500 pieces that we would sell, people were drawn to them, but in the end, they wouldn’t sell. Because there aren’t many people who want to drop $500 on a piece,” she says. Belford knew, at that point, that she wanted her designs to be approachable. She wanted shoppers to fall in love with the look of her pieces — and the price.
“I think this is the sweet spot for price. It’s the best price for the best quality that we can do. If you were to do jewelry that’s mostly in the under $100 range, there’s no way that it would be of a certain quality,” she explains.
Thirteen years later, Belford sits in her aforementioned corner office in a heritage building overlooking Gastown. The bright, naturally lit space is the scene for many of her Instagram images, so as one might imagine, it’s absolutely stunning. Just next door, her team of seven employees works away at all aspects of the business, from the design and crafting of pieces for the collection (Belford also works with select workshops in India for her designs) to mailing and customer support.
While, over the years, her business has grown exponentially, her appreciation for gemstones has never changed. In fact, it too may have increased. Belford’s designs feature a variety of stones, each one hand-picked, she says, including turquoise, aquamarine, green onyx and pearl.
But, her absolute favourite, she admits, is moonstone.
“Moonstone never goes in and out of style for me. I always love moonstone. It has that semi-translucency and can be faceted like a diamond, but it also has other colours within it. So, it has these little rainbow flashes in it,” she says. “It’s an amazing reminder of how amazing our planet is. You can’t manufacture this. You can’t replicate this — the emotion and the feeling it evokes.
“They are like little treasures.”
Last season, she’s introduced a fine jewelry branch to her line, offering new and beloved designs in solid gold with diamonds, morganite and garnets.
“I wanted to create those forever heirloom pieces that could be passed down,” she says. “I wanted to create those pieces that you never take off and that kind of become a part of you.”
The pricier pieces, and the recent addition of on-site custom engraving, are two features Belford is confident will take her line to another level — with customers and retailers alike. So far, names and nicknames, quotes and co-ordinates have proved popular for engraved messages, she says.
“It’s the things you would want to get if you were to get a tattoo — but you don’t want a tattoo,” she adds with a laugh. “I don’t have any tattoos, but I love thinking about what I would get. Like, ‘What makes me tick? What is my thing?’ And then you can just create it.
“It’s really fun when you see orders pop up and just to hear their stories.”
The additions have also led to new retail opportunities for the Leah Alexandra brand — including a recent pop-up shop at the iconic Fortnum & Mason department store in London, England. And Belford’s next area of exploration, she says, is into pearls. But, she cautions, these won’t be the perfect, round orbs your grandma may have worn.
“I love the natural shape,” she says, motioning to the collection of pieces laid out on pink-velvet jewelry trays, each one featuring pearls with irregular, Baroque-style shapes. “You recognize something more natural and … it’s a reminder of what nature can do and how fascinating it can be. It’s amazing.”
This year, Belford is also introducing a jewelry case for travel, a product she’s heard her customers asking for — and could use one herself.
“Personally, I’m constantly travelling with my jewelry — even if that just means travelling from work to the gym. I’m always grabbing my jewelry and putting it in my pockets. It’s awful, I’m embarrassed of how I travel with my jewelry,” she says with a laugh. Rather than the cumbersome “clips and pouches” she’s seen in other portable jewelry cases, Belford says she went for a simple and straightforward design.
“You literally place all the jewelry in and you zip it up,” she says.
While the travel cases are inspired more by her own needs, many of her other designs, Belford says, draw from the past.
“So many pieces are inspired by memories of jewelry that my grandmother or my mom had. It’s that nostalgia, even if you don’t physically have the piece, or they don’t have the piece, or maybe they’re not around — you still have this vision of it. Whether it’s a person that’s connected to it, or the person that gave the piece of jewelry, I feel like every piece of jewelry has some type of meaning to it,” she says. “Recently we did a fish necklace, like a movable fish. And that was inspired by the necklace that my grandmother never took off. She wore it every day. It was like a part of her.
“I wanted to make one in our collection that was dedicated to the memory of that necklace. So, that was really special.”
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
