While it may seem counterintuitive, a career on Wall Street has helped Boston-based Tiina Smith to create a thriving jewelry business. A Harvard graduate, Smith worked on Wall Street returned to Harvard Business School and then found her way back to Wall Street, but something interesting happened along the way. Smith has a life-long love of jewelry and was always wearing unique pieces. “People started asking me to help them find jewelry,” recalls Smith. “I curated a collection of signed vintage pieces that are design oriented and comfortable to wear.”
Smith’s interest in jewelry began when she was a young child and went on a trip to Venice with her grandmother, mother and sister. “My grandmother bought me a very modest ring with an emerald, which is my birthstone. I thought it was the most fabulous thing I ever saw and that’s when I was bitten by the jewelry bug,” says Smith, who started Tiina Smith Jewelry in 2016.
Starting A Business
When Smith started her business, she hired people who are jewelry experts to help her. They began selling jewelry though Instagram and Smith’s website while holding trunk shows with Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue. It allowed Smith to find out more about her clients and what works for them as well as what types of pieces appeal to people.
In 2018, Smith opened a brick-and-mortar store on Boston’s high-end Newbury Street. Then the pandemic hit and all of Smith’s business went back online so she closed the store, focusing on reaching out to people on Instagram and through an email list. “We send out educational emails for certain pieces,” explains Smith. “We’ll do a newsletter on all Van Cleef, or all women designers. For Valentine’s Day we traced the history of the heart graphic and how it became a symbol in jewelry.”
Smith finds that her clients like these informative emails and the information adds to the client’s interest and desire for a piece. “The background of the piece makes it more important and adds sentimental and emotional value,” notes Smith.
Vintage Value
Smith’s Wall Street background, which she references frequently as it relates to jewelry, comes out strongly when she talks about value. “I pay attention to value,” Smith says. “On Wall Street I was managing money and that made me understand value. Jewelry is a different form of asset, the value is in the beauty and materials. I buy the best at a good value, but I won’t pay just anything to get a piece.”
Value is one of the reasons that almost all of the pieces in the Tiina Smith Jewelry collection are signed because those jewels tend to hold their value. “Signed jewels are like waterfront property, they will hold value and escalate. I do buy unsigned jewels when they are something special.”
Twentieth Century Jewels
When she’s shopping for inventory, Smith chooses pieces that are design-centric. She doesn’t select large diamond or gemstone pieces instead the pieces she includes in the collection use small gems as part of the design. Most of the jewelry in the collection is from the 20th and 21st century because Smith is knowledgeable about the jewelry from that timeframe and understands it. Using a stock market analogy, Smith says she wouldn’t buy stocks from a company she didn’t understand and she applies that same principal to jewelry buying.
In addition to vintage jewelry, Smith also includes a number of contemporary designers in her collection. “It’s the same customer. Someone may want a pair of $3,000 Melissa Kaye earrings to wear to the beach so it doesn’t matter if they get lost. The same customer will invest in a Van Cleef & Arpels piece for evening, there’s a lot of overlap,” explains Smith.
Being based in Boston, Smith’s clientele includes a lot of students who are in grad school, or who are in PhD programs. A frequent question is what is the first piece of jewelry they should buy? According to Smith it depends on a person’s lifestyle. For someone who is a professional, Smith recommends a pair of day and night earrings that can be worn 24 hours a day. Smith likes brooches, believing that the form, unrestricted from fitting a finger, wrist or neck, gives jewelers a lot of breadth for their creativity. “Brooches are very chic,” concludes Smith. “I personally own a Lacloche Frères ‘Blink’ brooch. It’s a three-dimensional form that has diamonds and rubies, when you see it from one direction it has rubies, look at it from the other direction and you see diamonds. Brooches are for the cool people.”
Top of Page: Tiina Smith wearing Art Deco aquamarine jewelry, signed Cartier; Diamond and 18-karat gold day and night earrings, pendants are detachable, signed Boucheron, circa 1970s; Trombino ring features an unheated sapphire weighing approximately 12-carats and diamonds set in 18-karat white gold, signed Bulgari, circa 1955; Coral, malachite, lapis lazuli, diamond and 18-karat gold ear clips signed Van Cleef & Arpels, circa 1980s; Diamond, blue enamel, 18-karat gold and platinum brooch, signed Boucheron, circa 1970s.
Authored by Amber Michelle