Jewelry Brand to Know: little h

the beauty of the pearls. Pearl Paradise is all about having the most niche pearls and making those accessible to our clients.”

For her own work, though, the overall design of a piece superseded the beauty of the materials.

“I saw a void in innovative or trendsetting jewelry. It was just lacking in pearls,” Shepherd said. “I just saw regular, classic-style mounting after mounting, and I found it quite boring and also not challenging.”

Shepherd decided to leave her creative mark on the classic gem.

“I took it upon myself that it would be my mission to reinvent the pearl and come up with something different and unique.”

In 2011, she launched little h, focusing on the organic shapes of baroque pearls.

Around the same time, she started Pearl Collective, an endeavor from Pearl Paradise that highlights innovative pearl designs from a range of design talents.

“Our settings at Pearl Paradise can be a little bit more demure so it’s more about showcasing the pearls themselves,” Shepherd explained. “For the Pearl Collective we wanted to go to the extreme and make it edgy and more accessible to the younger generation. We collaborated with designers to bring in some fresh ideas; these designers don’t necessarily come from a pearl background or a jewelry background so they give us fresh new takes on pearls and kind of reach a different market.”

For her own line, Shepherd’s pearl geode collection is the culmination of her decades of study, work and experimentation. The genesis of the idea can be found, fittingly, in the jewelry industry’s gemstone mecca, Tucson.

Little h employs baroque freshwater pearls, or soufflé pearls, a term Shepherd said was coined by Jack Lynch of Sea Hunt Pearls, in her designs, which provide the perfect starting point for her “geodes.”

“At least in the pearl community, freshwater pearls are kind of looked down upon as the least expensive type of pearl, but in my jewelry line I look for the finest freshwater pearls,” she said. “Typically for the soufflé pearls, because they have a hollow interior, it’s really the best housing for my stones.

“They come in such beautiful colors. Freshwater pearls are the only cultured pearls that come in a natural color of pink, purple and a kind of peachy tone--I’m just in love with those colors. It goes really well with a lot of different colored gemstones.”

Shepherd favors a wide variety of colored gemstones to adorn the inside of her soufflé pearls, but said that she’s acquired some blue topaz that she is excited to work with next.

Little h begins retailing at $900.