LONDON — Nada Ghazal, the Lebanese-born designer, has grown up surrounded by the evil eye, a superstitious symbol in many Middle Eastern cultures.
It’s only natural that the evil eye then made it to her jewelry collections. She founded her fine jewelry label in 2004, but it was only in 2010 that she introduced the amulet in a small collection.
Now she’s ready to scale the range, which she’s named the Healing Eye and will be sold at Haute Couture in July along with her bestsellers of statement rings, earrings, bracelets and necklaces.
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Ghazal added her own touch to the evil eye by scattering the stones to make it look less obvious up close and more like a cobblestone road. “It’s meant to look like an eye, but not too in your face. People want to feel protected, but they don’t want it to be instantly noticeable. It was really popular in [2010] before we started growing internationally, ” she said in an interview.
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Her Healing Eye collection uses white, blue and black diamonds with brushed 18-karat gold and it’s being extended to more than just pendants. Now they’re going to be available in cuffs, bangles, rings and earrings.
Ninety percent of Ghazal’s jewelry uses brushed gold, a technique she’s been using since 2008 and which many clients found “odd” at first.
“Sometimes, when you have a lot of diamonds with a piece that has brushed gold, it grounds the piece and doesn’t make it bling-bling. I’m grounded as a person and brushed gold suits my personality. Also, most of our clients want something glamorous without attracting too much attention,” she said.
Ghazal’s clientele can’t be clumped together by age, but rather by their desires to “buy for themselves.” Even though women make up a larger portion of her clientele, she has an equally strong male audience and designs male-focused collections.
The designer visits New York and Naples, Italy, frequently for trunk shows and in her travels, she’s found two contrasting clienteles.
“We’re stocked at The Conservatory in Hudson Yards and the customers are very young and trendy. One of our biggest customers is Racquel Chevremont, the art collector and model, who is on ‘The Real Housewives of New York City.’ She has a set of four engagement rings that have been stacked together” she said.
“In Naples though, our customer is between the ages of 60 and 95. It’s very, very different, but what makes them all connect is that they want jewelry that is individualistic,” she added.
Ghazal’s jewelry is full of character. Her scattered stones across all categories are a fan favorite and there are pieces with nuances such as a gold pendant of a door with a butterfly; a dome ring that resembles the Sultan’s palace in “Aladdin” or cuffs that look like barbed wires, an image from her childhood in Beirut that’s been engraved in her memory.
Her biggest market from a wholesale standpoint is the U.S., where she’s in 11 stores such as Twist, Shannon Green Fine Jewelry and Aleph Gallery, but Beirut remains her biggest market in sales and volume.
Ghazal’s Beirut store was bombed in 2020 and has since moved into ABC Achrafieh Department Store, where she has a consignment space that she’s been able to redecorate to look like her old store.
The designer’s average value per transaction is around $6,000 to $7,000, but for an engagement ring the size of Chevremont’s, that totals up to $20,000.
Ghazal’s jewelry ranges from $890 for a mini necklace to $44,235 for a Door of Opportunity necklace.
She has been slowly scaling the business without any investors and putting any profit she makes back into the business. Showcasing at Haute Couture is part of the formula of connecting with others, but soon she will be setting up a flagship in London in July, where she’s now based.
“After my store was blown up, it was something we couldn’t repair because of the area it was in. I feel that London is a bridge between Lebanon, the U.S. and the rest of the Middle East,” said Ghazal.
Before 2015, she had a big Middle Eastern clientele that would visit Lebanon.
“But they stopped coming to Lebanon and they started going to cities like London and Paris. The Middle Eastern customers used to travel to Europe and at the end, they would come to Beirut and shop. Many of them depended on the Lebanese buyers and their great taste, which we’ve now lost, but I hope to bring back with the London store,” Ghazal explained.
She’s chosen London as her home, personally and professionally for its cosmopolitan nature and multiculturalism.