Brazilian fine jewelry brand Sauer is setting roots down in the U.S.
The more than 80-year-old family business is opening its U.S. flagship at 800 Madison Avenue in New York City, with a two-floor storefront that offers Sauer’s unique gemstone pieces and exclusive collections.
For the brand, which is led by co-chief executive officer Gabriel Andre Sauer and creative director Stephanie Wenk, the U.S. flagship was a natural next step and one that was years in the making.
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“We have a clientele already in New York,” Sauer said. “We have been here since 2020. We started the operation here in the beginning of the pandemic, and then of course we struggled a little bit during that crazy time, but as soon as things started opening we were able to start selling our collections at a few retailers.”
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Sauer has established a customer base in the U.S. through wholesale partnerships with retailers like Moda Operandi, Bergdorf Goodman and Kirna Zabête. According to the co-CEO, Sauer also has many American clients who travel to Brazil, so it was important for the fine jeweler to open a store in the U.S. to cater directly to that customer base.
He explained the brand looked at other U.S. cities for Sauer’s flagship, but that New York City, and specifically Madison Avenue, made the most sense because it’s a tourist destination and it is surrounded by likeminded jewelry brands.
“We are not a mass production jeweler,” Sauer said. “We are a niche jeweler, so we need to find the right niches and we decided this was the correct market to open a store. We chose the right spot because we don’t want to be in just any spot. Since we are a family business, we don’t have the pressure to just start opening stores wherever, so we would rather take it slow, but make the right decisions. This is something that we didn’t just decide to open a store in the last year, this project started four years ago and it matured.”
The storefront takes inspiration from the brand’s Brazilian roots and merges it with a New York midcentury architecture aesthetic. The store incorporates various motifs and stones prevalent in Sauer’s core jewelry pieces.
Sauer’s Madison Avenue store will offer an exclusive New York City collection, which includes necklaces, rings, bracelets and earrings made with 18-karat gold, emeralds, malachite, aquamarine, tourmaline and other materials. There will also be pieces from Sauer’s core collections, like Ethos, Fungus and Heritage.
Sauer stated the brand’s styles mostly fall under a price range of $2,000 to $30,000. Sauer also offers high jewelry pieces that are made bespoke for clients.
“Always our collections have three main things that we always try to communicate, which are nature, art and spirituality,” Sauer said. “All of our collections embrace one of these pillars.”
Sauer was established in 1941 by Jules Sauer, the co-CEO’s grandfather, who fled Europe during World War I to Brazil and began working with precious gemstones like emeralds, tourmalines and amethyst, and developed unique carving methods that are still used by the brand today.
“We always used these stones, but in a different approach — sometimes doing objects and sculptures,” Sauer said. “This carving technique has been in the business for years and I think one of the main things that Stephanie did was she revisited all of our history and she started applying this in a very modern fashion.”
Art is a main source of inspiration for Wenk when designing Sauer’s jewelry. At the Armory Show in New York, Wenk helped establish Sauer’s art prize, which is awarded to an emerging artist participating in the art fair.
Sauer’s Madison Avenue store joins the brand’s fleet of six locations in Brazil. Sauer said that the brand doesn’t have any immediate plans to open other stores in the U.S. as it wants to focus on the Madison Avenue store for now.
“We believe that if we are successful here, it’s not easier, but it makes more sense to expand to more cities,” he said. “We still feel that New York is one of the main tourist destinations as well, in terms of a door to the world. This is the right place to be.”