Belle Brooke Barer really likes “the tactile world.” While she has a web and social media presence, she considers her digital footprint secondary to the experience of buying her handcrafted artisanal designs at Rock + Feather Featuring the Fine Jewelry of Belle Brooke, her store and gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
America has become “too homogenized, with too much Amazon,” she believes, and she’s concerned that the “experience of personally interacting with a salesperson or designer or owner of a company is dwindling.” Barer hopes “we’ll eventually return to the time when people will be walking down the street. That’s what they do when they visit Santa Fe” — and she aims “to provide the experience they are looking for.” Rather than spending on a high-traffic website, she allocates the majority of her marketing dollars to driving customers into the store.
An art major, Barer began her career as a photographer. While taking pictures of historic buildings for the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, she began studying metalsmithing. Now she turns her finely trained photographer’s eye to designing innovative jewelry.
“Even if people don’t realize it, photography is a lot about design. It’s all about how to draw the eye into an image and how to keep the eye in the image,” she explains. “I want to create a piece [of jewelry] that draws you in and is captivating at the same time because you always want to keep looking at it.”
From tools to techniques, Barer works to preserve and maintain the heritage of artisanal design and protecting the environment. Her handcrafted creations are made from 100% recycled metals and “thoughtfully sourced natural gemstones and diamonds.” She often uses the same goldsmithing tools that belonged to her great-grandfather, whom she never met.
She admits that some of her pieces are “Santa Fe-ish” in their use of silver and triangular designs, but she attributes these more to a Moroccan influence. “Santa Fe is very well known for Southwestern and Indigenous art. I leave that to those people whose heritage it is,” she says.
Art Deco and floral motifs also inspire her, though she adds her own contemporary spin. Harmony and balance are integral to her design philosophy, coming through in the subtle ways she uses diamonds; she describes these pieces as “not flashy” and “more like designer jewelry with diamonds in it.”
A shop and a gallery
Barer started a wholesale business in 2005, working with a few galleries on a consignment basis before ramping up in 2007. Then, in 2016, she opened a store in a “funky” space that had originally been a stable. The venue presented more than the usual challenges. The floor was not level, the lack of insulation made it either unbearably hot or cold, and there was little room to display both jewelry and art. More importantly, she says, “it wasn’t a place that conveyed the fact that I sold $3,000 earrings. It was more the type of store where a customer walked in and asked, ‘What’s on sale?’”
Two years later, she tripled her space by moving across the street to an adobe structure that had been built and owned by three generations of the same family. It offered all the amenities, including lots of electrical outlets, air conditioning and heat. Barer was also attracted to the store’s better street presence, which “makes people want to stop.”
In addition to offering plenty of room for display cases, the space had a back room that “lends itself to wall art such as photography and paintings.” She created a gallery to showcase the work of other women artisans, including her mother, Cara, who transforms books into art by sculpting, dyeing and then photographing them.
Having a combination jewelry store and gallery presented Barer with a dilemma: She had to come up with a name. “Belle Brooke is a great name for jewelry, but it didn’t feel right as the name of a gallery,” she says. “The name Rock + Feather just came to me. It was, ‘Yes, that’s it.’” As she explains, “a rock brings us closer to earth, and a feather closer to the sky.”
The new location made a “humongous difference. No one walks in and asks if anything is on sale,” she reports. Still, she acknowledges that some people come for the jewelry and others for the art, and not all of her jewelry customers like the art that’s on display.
Making purchases count
Barer is “comfortable” weathering the Covid-19 storm. “I don’t know what else I would do with my life. This is what I’ve always dreamed of doing, and for me to quit now would be unthinkable.”
Fortunately, she points out, silver has made her line more resilient during the economic downturn. “It offers affordable price points, but customers can see the quality of my work. Maybe they can’t buy the 18-karat [gold and] diamond earrings now, but they can purchase a silver pendant for $350.”
She does worry that in “our consumer-focused culture,” people often fail to grasp the difference between a “throw- away item” and one “guaranteed to last a lifetime.” While she senses an attitude shift as people become more aware, the consequences threaten the survival of businesses like hers. “People don’t understand how close to the edge an artisanal business operates. A lot of people walk into the store and treat it as if it is a free museum. But craftspeople need the public to support us — not by clicking ‘Like’ on an Instagram post, but by actually making the commitment to buy.”
And the return on investment “goes back to the community,” she adds. “Preserving our artistic heritage and culture and craftsmanship is critical. Everyone should shop small.”
rockandfeather.com Article from the Rapaport Magazine - April 2021. To subscribe click here.