ANY TIME you see Heather Harrington Jones you immediately notice her “oversized” jewellery – the signature feature of her personal fashion statement.
“I like really big pieces with diamonds, big stones. I am a very tall person,” explains the almost 6-footer. The Canadian jeweller, who married Barbadian-Canadian Jean-Paul Jones and made Barbados her home 31 years ago, also likes “stately pieces”.
She came here with the skills in jewellery design and selection acquired over several years. The interest in jewellery was first aroused while she was an 18-year-old, helping out at a private store in Calgary, Alberta.
“I learnt how to do a lot of work with gold and precious metals and silver in his workshop and that was the beginning of my love story with jewellery,” she told EASY. Someone also trained her in diamond buying and “from there I basically just grew into owning my own store in 1999”.
Now she helps others to create their own fashion statement with personalised jewellery designed exclusively for them – from the sketching stage to the prized piece worn happily at the end. “We are the ones in Barbados that do specific designs in jewellery,” Heather said, as she sat beside a classically-designed showcase in her West Coast store, Heather Harrington Jones.
“I do most of my personal shopping in St Maarten because I liked 18-carat gold and I knew that there was a niche market here as we were growing as an island for tourism and luxury tourism and so I decided it was time for me to stop travelling and open up my own business,” Heather said.
When a customer walks into her store, their business is treated with the utmost privacy. Everyone who works with her understands this, and less there is any doubt, she sets the example. She does not divulge names of customers, saying outright, “I cannot tell you who my customers are.” All she would share was that they have such confidence in her ability and that of her small team of jewellers, gemologists and appraisal specialists, that when she preselects pieces for some of them while she is on regular overseas buying trips, rarely does the customer reject her selection.
“We are very private, so if people want to have a secret say like an engagement we would have knowledge of this for six months in advance some times, but everyone knows that the designing and purchasing of jewellery is a very private matter and a lot of people respect that because they don’t want anyone to have the same things as they do.”
Heather says mass production and mass marketing via the Internet make it hard for people to find pieces of jewellery that are different and though “nice luxurious brands” are still to be found, a lot of them are mass-marketed these days.
Between 60 and 70 per cent of her jewellery is custom-designed and mainly made in Barbados. “If they want me to design it here and make it from scratch, I can source the stones, the metal, all the components that you need to make the most amazing jewellery and they can say it is made in Barbados . . . . On the other hand if they want me to find something special in the world for them we source jewellery from all over the world.”
She worked for manufacturers in Europe and sometimes helped in designing pieces for 15 years before opening her Barbados store. As an agent for 15 luxury brands, she distributed those brands in the Caribbean and Central America
She knows her precious metal and gemstones well. In the upstairs showroom, diamonds, pearls, sapphires and a host of other precious stones catch the eye, their beauty popping out from the ornately-designed necklaces, earrings and finger rings in ornate showcases where they are securely displayed.
She has picked up a lot of knowledge travelling the world attending jewellery shows and will shortly be off on another annual jewellery show jaunt, the 18th year of attending the biggest shows in the world.
“I travel a lot extensively. I go to shows in Italy; there are five jewellery shows coming up in Las Vegas. I went to the shows before I opened the business because I wanted to make sure I had a really good grip on the design features.”
The shapes and colours of Barbados’ flowers, the blue and green hues of the sea, all figure into her designs, accounting for the way topaz and other stones are set. Heather delights in working with Tahitian and South Sea pearls which she likes so much.
“What inspired me to open the store was I used to go looking for jewellery and with my exposure to all these beautiful European designs, I could not find anything really that I loved in Barbados.
“Women always like gold and diamonds . . . . This is a good example here,” she said, pointing out features of the most intricate pendant on a necklace and in the tidily set bow that is a finer ring. “This is seven individual pieces put together. It is a work of art,” she said of the ring.
“I would phone a guy that’s a designer and say ‘can you do this design for me, Jeanine” [Banfield, a George Brown University graduate goldsmith who is part of her team] and she will help me because she is good at sketching and we come up with something really special.”
There are times when the actual manufacturing process might require help from outside. This is when she is likely to turn to her Italian counterparts.
“With private jewellery we can actually have a discussion about it and say ‘well we don’t have this; or we can make this. Whereas in the normal retail store, you go in, you look at the jewellery, if you like it you buy it. Usually the person dealing with you is only there to sell it, not to design it or not to try and figure out a problem.
“We do all the stages, we draw it, we get you to come in, pick the stone colour, and we get the client really involved in the process.”
Inspiration and energy come while she is taking her daily early morning stroll along the beach. When she takes to her hammock, a favourite pastime, her head is likely to be buried in a book.
Instinctively running her fingers along the handmade beads, diamonds and South Sea Pearls of the long necklace strung around her neck, Heather remarked, “My favourite thing is handmade because you know that someone actually put their hand on it and you know that it is personal.”
The thought of designing and crafting another exclusive piece of jewellery is what gets her out of bed in the morning. “I thought of retiring so many times, but it is my passion. I cannot work 24/7 like I used to, but I love, love, what I do.”