As a part of my job, I see a lot of jewelry. Tons of it. And after so much of it, hardly anything inspires awe or wonder anymore. Elsa Zhao’s jewelry, however, is different. It pops open your eyes with their wonderful blend of colors, large stones and the extreme attention to detail. She has mastered the art of creating pieces that are as grand as fragile, and as royal as whimsical.
Ms. Zhao’s brand, RichandRare, has now completed 10 years. And her journey has been quite organic, flowing like a calm river.
From practicality to beauty
Born to chemical engineering professors, Ms. Zhao studied civil engineering. But the hardcore job of building and hammering didn’t inspire happiness in her. “It wasn’t about beauty,” she said. After getting married and having children, she got back to studies, heading to the Gemmological Institute of America. That proved much more interesting for her. “I made one [piece of] jewelry for myself, and got a lot of compliments from my friends They started asking for help to make jewelry for them, and then I started to take orders. I helped my friends create their jewelry. I started going to factories a lot, I learnt all the techniques [of working] on gold, and how to set a stone, everything like that. So, I picked it up step by step and started my business,” says a smiling Ms. Zhao.
Creating one piece only of each design – at least for most of her designs – Ms. Zhao aims to create everyday fine jewelry. They are not necessarily light in terms of number of stones or the weightage of gold, but more defined in size with high intricacy of details.
The Dream of Leaves necklace, for example, is a beautiful, ethereal choker composed of rock crystals and diamonds, bearing a striking similarity to Native American dream catchers. Then there is the Midsummer Night Waltz necklace – a gorgeous piece made up of symmetrically placed mini-Oriental fans in diamonds and emeralds, with a tear drop emerald hanging at the bottom.
It’s been quite an uphill journey for Ms. Zhao. With a pensive expression, she remembers, “Changing from engineering to jewelry, and managing all by myself, people still ask me ‘is this your family business?’ Because they always think a middle-aged woman like me must rely on families or have some sort of resources to enter the business. They don’t believe that I started from scratch by taking orders from my friends.”
Perhaps my favorite piece from RichandRare is the Dragon with a Rose brooch – made to commemorate the Year of the Dragon. This lovable dragon, made with hammered gold, holds a bunch of diamond roses in its paws, and looks adoringly at its audience with cabochon blue topaz ‘puppy’ eyes. When I mentioned this piece to Ms. Zhao, she laughs and says, “The eyes are my secret. The eyes move. If you see the brooch in person, and if you look from the other side, the eyes move to that side. It’s hard to make, and we put a lot of effort on the eyes.”
The Dragon with a Rose brooch, combined with a beautiful Elephant brooch, has been auctioned by Sotheby’s. The 18k gold elephant, carrying a looking glass in its trunk, is decorated with brilliant-cut diamonds, and is suspended from a vibrant hot air balloon created with cabochon blue topaz, amethyst and brilliant-cut diamonds. “I had this idea during COVID, when we were locked in Hong Kong, and you know Hong Kong is not a very big city. And we cannot travel. So I come out with this idea of an elephant that can travel around, and it has a telescope,” Ms Zhao explains her inspiration.
The elephant, with its textured skin, is in fact, in the natural yellow color of gold. Sotheby’s Hong Kong, at its Important Jewels auction in January 2024, auctioned the dragon and the elephant brooch pair for HK$190,500 (approximately US$24,400) – nearly 2.5 times the pre-sale estimate.
The creation process
The Hong Kong based-jewelry designer, who I met over Zoom, seeks inspiration on various fronts. For her everyday fine jewelry, she looks towards her wardrobe. “…because I always think I have a brooch here or I have an earring there, I can make my outfit look perfect. So that’s one of my inspirations.”
The stones also define her pieces as she chooses to take a reverse approach to her design “Each stone is different. No two emeralds look exactly the same. They have different luster. They have different clarity, size, shape. So I think I should have a unique design for this stone to make a perfect piece. So my second inspiration is from the beauty of the stone itself,” Ms. Zhao explains.
Drawn mostly to animal motifs as a subject, it’s not hard to imagine Ms. Zhao bending over a piece of paper, as she sketches her designs, with music in the background. Once it has been etched on paper, RichandRare’s workshop gets on with materializing her ideas into beautiful 3D creations.
Using Florentine techniques, hammering, engraving and multiple other processes, Ms. Zhao brings her sketches to life. “You see our lions or the horses? They have a special gold texture. Our craftsmen use the knife to make one by one slices under the microscope to achieve that texture. And no one can copy this. It’s very hard to make it,” Ms. Zhao explains proudly.
This leads to the fact that craftsmanship is very important to Ms. Zhao. “You can copy the shape, but you cannot copy the details and the tiny surface textures. I think that’s why I focus on the craftsmanship a lot to make pieces that you really cannot copy,” she explains.
Ms. Zhao mostly sets her gems into 18k gold, using metals like platinum or titanium very rarely. While yellow gold makes a design feel more royal, white gold has a more fashionable appeal according to Ms. Zhao. She also bets on the strength of gold to make sure the jewelry is not too heavy for the wearer.
Turquoise has caught Ms. Zhao’s fancy in recent times, and she is experimenting with it. “I’m sourcing a lot of turquoise lately. We cut the turquoise in our own factory and I make it into a pumpkin or a cloud. I can make it any shape I want. Turquoise is a really interesting stone for me right now. I did several approaches with turquoise and it’s come out very nice, very antique. The color is strong and very sharp. It matches the summer!” Ms. Zhao says excitedly.
The whimsical aura
Ms. Zhao’s jewelry is not straightforward. From delicate ginkgo leaves to majestic lion heads to cherubic expressions, RichandRare’s jewelry is distinctive and playful. This whimsical quality extends to her stores as well.
In sharp contrast to other luxury jewelry brand stores – which are always minimalist and stoic to put maximum focus on jewelry – RichandRare’s three stores (in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Shenzen) have an Alice in Wonderland theme. Prepare to jump down a rabbit hole, be mesmerised by a profusion of flowers, walk on a chess carpet, and marvel at the metal ceiling’s water effect.
As careful as Ms. Zhao is about creating her jewels, she is careful about vetting who buys her pieces as well. “I will tell her [potential client] the story of how I created the piece. Sometimes you will feel that this person doesn’t understand the beauty of it. So yeah, I don’t sell. I just let it pass, until I find someone who truly loves that piece,” Ms. Zhao says. After all, just money can’t buy everything.
It’s been 10 years to RichandRare, and Ms. Zhao is committed even more to her journey. She continues to enjoy it and learn from it. “I still get inspired every day,” she says. If you ask her about the brand’s future plans, she doesn’t have one. She wants to focus on acquiring more stones and creating more jewelry. “I hope all the inspirations will not stop…I just want to do more beautiful pieces and I want those pieces to leave some good memories for me and also for those who like them.”
She finds opening more stores tedious, and she confesses that she doesn’t know what the next 10 years will be like. But creating meaningful jewelry is where her true passion lies. She wants people to wear her pieces regularly, and not store them in the bank.
Sitting calmly in her chair, wearing an elegant cream blouse with bold white gold hoops, Ms. Zhao says sweetly, sheepishly, “Opening a new shop will not make me too happy, but making jewelry does.”
