After decades-long careers in the fashion and jewellery industry, what inspired you to start Pond, and what drove you to establish your own jewellery brand?
We’ve always had shared reference points when it comes to aesthetics and style. We trust and respect each other's creative opinions, which we think is the most important thing. Working together for so long within design teams in fast-paced environments meant we knew we worked well together. We loved what we did but for a long time, we were feeling dissatisfied with the lack of environmental responsibility and frustrated at not being able to do things our way. We’d always talked about starting our own brand so when the right opportunity presented itself we went for it.
You use predominantly vintage jewellery, recycled metals and dead stock materials, how does the sourcing process work?
It's a combination of antique markets and eBay. We have a few beloved dealers who know what we are looking for. We do have popular styles that sell out quickly and then we don’t know if we will ever be able to recreate them but we try to resource things and pick up other things that inspire new pieces along the way.
Collaboration seems to be a recurring theme in Pond’s approach. Can you tell us about any notable collaborations you've undertaken?
One of the first things we did before we were even Pond was a collection for Nat’s friend James Long, Creative Director at Iceberg. He wanted jewellery for one of his runway shows so we decided to make it all from vintage pieces that we cut up and reconfigured. That’s when we started to think about how we might work with vintage as a concept for a label.
Tell us a bit more about how your limited edition and made-to-order services work. Why does this business model work better for you?
We prefer to find the material first and then use it as the design inspiration. This approach prevents waste from the start. Being made-to-order is also part of preventing waste – we don’t have stock hanging around and we don’t mark down. If something doesn’t do as well as we expected, we just redesign it.