NEW YORK — At Catbird, the jewelry brand founded in in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood by Rony Vardi that celebrates two decades in business this year, the thing to do is get zapped.
Had a baby? Get zapped. Got engaged? Get zapped. Got a promotion? A friendship to cement? Just wanna feel something after a bottomless brunch that should have had a bottom? Zap! Zap! ZAP!
Zapping goes like this: You plop down at one of a number of tables — about the size of a manicure station in a nail salon — and a specially trained technician affixes your wrist with a length of chain pulled from a spool. (Catbird’s employees are almost invariably tattooed, with an excellent, baroque haircut.) They carefully measure the chain for comfort, clip it with pliers, put on sunglasses and advise you not to look directly into the light. Then — ZAP! — it’s welded onto you, for good.
It’s the “original” Forever bracelet, a sign outside reminds you, tossing shade at Cartier’s Love bracelet like Elizabeth Taylor tossed diamonds at those gambling boys. (Catbird began zapping in 2017 — long after the introduction of Cartier’s Love bracelet in 1969, although that piece and other “permanent” jewelry competitors require the wearer to periodically tighten the bracelet with a tool.) The zaps start at $98 for a bracelet called “Sweet Nothing,” though larger chains with diamonds are available for more than $300.
Zapping is the synthesis of the Catbird ethos: delicate, affordable and tender, with a feel-good undercurrent. (Like a solid indie-rock hit!) A keepsake, Victorian in its romanticism and daintiness, but contemporary in its flexibility: What it means is up to the wearer.
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Its engagement rings, which have a gently vintage flair like bands of warm diamonds, or elegantly pronged stones, were de rigueur for brides who wore flower crowns and decorated their weddings with Mason jars. But even as those trends have faded, Catbird remains, for women who idolize Caroline Polachek and get married in secondhand dresses, the equivalent of a Tiffany engagement ring for women who were the president of their sorority and walk down the aisle in a $10,000 Vera Wang gown.
“Catbird makes things that are special, trinket-like,” says stylist and editor Leith Clark, one of the line’s earliest collaborators. “Catbird makes you feel nostalgic about something that’s brand new. How is that even possible?”
The once small company has been growing — with two other stores in New York, plus locations in Los Angeles, Boston and, as of this week, Washington, D.C. A space in Georgetown, on M Street, is now filled with antique furniture and twinkling light fixtures, sparkling gems and zappers.
“It was time, it was just time to spread our wings. We have a nice customer base in D.C.,” says Vardi. The pieces’ affordability has made them particularly appealing to college students, who then grow up and continue to patronize Catbird, gravitating to more expensive pieces, including the brand’s popular engagement ring designs, and remaining zapped in. Each time the company open a new store, it designs a thematic charm, which can be affixed to your zap or any other piece. D.C.’s will be a cherry blossom.
“It’s a really beautiful storefront,” says Catbird’s creative director, Leigh Batnick Plessner. “It feels like a nice way to meet customers where they are.” When Vardi was working at the store in Brooklyn during the holidays in December, she met a number of customers visiting from D.C. “I was like, ‘Oh, good news!’”
Behind Catbird’s longevity is the fact that it's kept its grounded sweetness. Its tiny gold rings, like the best-selling Threadbare ring — $48, 14-karat gold and beloved by Meghan Markle — or its little choker necklaces are designed to be layered and barely seen, the accessible foundation of the perennially cash-strapped millennial’s jewelry collection.
The look was the brainchild of Vardi’s own style; she never takes her jewelry off, stacking and layering it and letting it get a bit worn and even beat-up, but “it’s still gold and diamonds,” she says, sitting at a table on the second floor of the Williamsburg outpost, which is filled with antique cases and carpets, while the Cocteau Twins played on the stereo. “You should feel really good when you put it on. You should feel like you’ve made a good decision.”
“It’s jewelry that you don’t want to take off,” says Batnick Plessner, 44. “It’s jewelry that makes you feel better when you’re wearing it in the morning when you’re home having your coffee.”
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Since 2004, when Vardi, 54, opened Catbird as a 200-square-foot space a few blocks from its current Williamsburg location, that sensibility has remained, even as the businesses in the neighborhood morphed from warehouse rave spaces, dive bars and hubs of alternative fashion to brick-and-mortar spaces for direct-to-consumer start-ups. (Walking from the L Train to Catbird’s Williamsburg flagship store is like walking through your Instagram feed: Everlane, Parachute, COS, Glossier, a Google store, a coffee shop that’s actually a bank….?!)
Catbird is an originator, survivor and thriver of the early-aughts hipster wave that Williamsburg symbolized. Even if Bedford Avenue is practically unrecognizable to anyone who lived there when Vardi launched Catbird, she says the attitude of the neighborhood remains essential to the brand.
“There were so many artists and stylists and editors and models that [lived here and] would shop at Catbird. It was their local jewelry store. They would buy Catbird and wear it on the runways and wear it all over the place. So there was a real dissemination of the brand throughout the world because I lived in Williamsburg.” (Vardi now lives in Carroll Gardens.) When she started, she mostly sold the work of fellow local jewelers, many of whom she still sells today.
“It definitely has a hipster origin, but specifically not in the PBR/beards/irony way that has become a trademark of the early-aughts hipster era,” says Nicolette Mason, a brand strategist and consultant. She sees it in a different realm: “the sweet, playful, whimsical counterpart to ‘indie sleaze.’ I think they’ve managed to retain a lot of these parts of their identity without feeling dated.”
The aesthetic was so strong that, in 2015, the French department store Le Bon Marché had a Brooklyn-themed pop-up that featured Catbird.
Many brands (and bands) that were popular in the early Catbird era feel dated, or now cease to exist — the American Spirit cigarette has been replaced with the vape, Urban Outfitters is better known for its C-suite’s Republican leanings than its ironic T-shirts — and remember American Apparel? But the Catbird aesthetic has been luckier. More recently, one of its most famous customers, musician Phoebe Bridgers, became a collaborator. Catbird made three tooth pins for Bridgers’s supergroup boygenius, and the trio has since released collections with the band and the musician — one with Bridgers, in 2022, and a separate collection with boygenius in 2023, with a new one out this week. The first round of boygenius pieces “broke the internet,” wrote Nylon magazine in November.
Catbird has been at the forefront of a number of jewelry trends over the past two decades. That may sound trite, considering that jewelry is a luxury, but adornment and investment treasures, of course, are deeply reflective of cultural mores. They were an early champion of the trend for smaller, more delicate jewelry, moving away from the chunkier stones that were in fashion in the late 20th century.
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“You have to get in close to see it,” Batnick Plessner says. “You hold it close to yourself. You’re not going to see it from across the room — it requires intimacy to really engage with it.”
Catbird’s approachable stores and pleasing e-commerce site have also led the way in reconfiguring the whole concept of engagement ring shopping — couples often shop together, as Vardi points out, which Catbird was early to encourage. Couples “will ask, ‘What should I do, or what should be done?’” Vardi says. “And dispelling those rules is part and parcel of what we do.”
“Nothing is quick and then just over,” says Clark. “They have a very different way of creating, on their own timeline. That feels very female to me — to do things differently with more meaning and with a slower and more intentional pace.”
Sustainability was also an early focus for the brand; it uses recycled gold almost exclusively, and 95 percent of the diamonds it uses are recycled.
Many other brands that neighbor Catbird in Williamsburg, or that are known for supplying other standbys of the millennial lifestyle, started with a similar ethical promise. But the jeweler is one of the few that has managed to stick by it, zap by zap.
“As a shopper, whenever I’m buying,” says Vardi, “I just want to feel confident that the person I’m buying from is doing the right thing.”
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