Olivia Bond

When I ask Olivia Bond how her husband proposed to her, she laughs. “He proposed with a wedding band. I think he knew that choosing an engagement ring for me would be fraught.” We are sitting in the sunroom of her family home, in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, amid packing boxes, having wedged our interview into an hour’s reprieve between a meeting at her office and a visit to her new home, a few streets away. “It was pretty spontaneous,” she continues. “He hadn’t told a soul.” She pauses. “It probably would have been nice if he’d asked my dad.”

It’s an approach she sees less and less of in her professional life. “The whole enterprise is very female-centric these days,” she says. “And consultation is very big.” Whether it’s the rise of female jewellers – in an industry previously dominated by men advising other men on what to buy women – or in women either purchasing jewellery themselves or creatively influencing what is bought for them, the industry has undergone a revolution. In the past, it was usually men who bought women jewellery, typically as a surprise, and it was unthinkable for a woman to be involved in the process.

"The majority of men who come in to buy engagement rings have already been nudged in the right direction," she says. “I had one client come in with a PowerPoint presentation. And most bring in a sister or a friend or FaceTime their mum when they are choosing. It’s very sweet.”

Olivia started her eponymous business twelve years ago. In its nascent years, she performed the role of private jeweller, growing by word of mouth – “truly the greatest marketing tool,” she says – creating custom pieces for friends and family. Her husband’s grandmother, Eileen ‘Red’ Bond, was her first customer. “It was only when Red asked me to source her a stone, that I realised I knew how to do it. And when she asked me to design the setting and have it made, I realised I had the contacts for that as well.”

At the time she was pregnant with her first child, her daughter Lucille, and everyone she knew was getting married. “Traditionally a lot of private jewellers were men, in family-run businesses. I suppose I was a little disruptive in this way, starting out when I did, because I was a millennial woman, recently married, creating custom jewellery for my peers.” That she is innately chic, and an unofficial ambassador of her own brand, can only have helped matters. “I think a lot of women I knew trusted my taste and were happy to tell their partners to come to me for guidance,” is all she will say about that.

While this link between Olivia and her clients, who are often friends, or friends of friends, is integral to her success, it does present its challenges. “I’ve had friends ask me point-blank if their partner has been in,” she says. “You can’t say yes, but if you say no, that’s problematic too. I’ve learnt to be very good at keeping secrets.”

She has loved fine jewellery for as long as she can remember but her passion began, in earnest, during a stint at Sotheby’s in London in 2008. She recalls taking a tour of the auction exhibitions with British fine jewellery maven Joanna Hardy, who was the senior jewellery specialist and auctioneer at Sotheby’s at the time. “The way she talked about the jewels, how they were made, the people who had worn them, and how they had been handed down… I was mesmerised. I knew from that point that I had to be involved.”

Back home in Sydney, she took courses in gemmology, jewellery valuing and diamond grading, and began getting calls to make one-off pieces. But it was growing her social media presence, at a time when Instagram was principally used for sharing holiday snaps, that accelerated everything. Now she has a bricks-and-mortar showroom in Sydney’s CBD, and a fully-fledged e-commerce business, with a range that includes custom and ready-to-wear. Olivia has used the same workshop since the beginning – “they’re like my family” – and everything is designed and produced locally. Without any crazy minimum order requirements, she can take risks and be nimble – acting on a particularly great response to a new piece or accommodating a client’s last-minute request for personalisation. If a client purchases her iconic scallop necklace, and decides they want a heart engraved on the back with their initials on it, or the length of a chain adjusted to better suit their torso, it can be done, and these sorts of refinements happen all the time. “Increasingly, people want their jewellery to reflect them, to be deeply personal. I see a real move away from standardised looks and I am doing a lot more birthstones and esoteric motifs.”

As the lucky owner of a pair of her diamond twist earrings myself, I comment that I saw a friend recently in the street with the same design, albeit with a slightly different shaped twist. “Oh yes,” she says, “even with ready-to-wear, my workshop refuses to make things exactly the same.”

Leaning into bespoke pieces, and eschewing anything that looks mass-produced, is the order of the day. In the engagement space, the shift back to heirloom style and old mine cuts is notable, she says. Partly a counterwave to the rise of the laboratory diamond, and partly traceable to tastemakers like Taylor Swift, who prefer a more antique aesthetic.

"For those who visit me, the sentiment is very much – let’s take it down a notch, let’s make it softer, let’s have a diamond with character. If people don’t want a lab diamond, they really want to make sure it doesn’t look like one.”

There’s also an inclination to do things differently. Classic styles like a four- or six-claw diamond set in a white gold or platinum band are still requested, but declining in popularity, while coloured stones, like sapphires and rubies, are increasingly coveted. A recent custom engagement ring designed for a friend – a two-carat brilliant-cut set with a ruby on one side and an emerald on the other – is a personal favourite. Again, she attributes the bolder choices being made to women driving the process.

"Take the wedding band,” she says. “It used to be a bit of an afterthought, but now it’s taken on a life of its own.” Until recently, it was usually designed at the same time as the engagement ring, so it would match, and sit flush, she tells me. Now, she says, it’s a total free-for-all.

Increasingly it’s worn on any finger, sometimes two are stacked together, sometimes it takes pride of place during the working week, with the engagement ring added to the repertoire only for the weekend. “Matching is no longer relevant. The rules are out. And I see lots of women who are very busy with their careers, doctors, and surgeons, and wearing a huge knuckleduster to work during the week isn’t feasible. They want something sleeker.”

Regardless of trends, there is one piece of advice she always offers when someone is buying an engagement ring: Focus on the stone, not the setting. A lot of her clients become preoccupied with the latter, but in terms of budget, it’s a fraction of the overall cost. More to the point, a decade goes by, and Olivia finds that many of her brides come in wanting to remodel it anyway. “I suppose it’s a bit like a marriage,” she says. “Focus your energies on the part that is going to endure. The rest doesn’t matter so much.”

Although wedding jewellery is only a portion of her business, it is one that gives her a lot of joy. “It’s a privilege, being trusted to create such an important piece. And it’s a fun process, too,” she tells me. “We giggle when clients rock up with a screenshot of their girlfriend’s hand… a photo is not a good indicator of hand size. And when they pause to turn off their location sharing so they can’t be tracked.”

The trends she sees in bridal jewellery reflect the trends in the broader market, and what her clients want is all the inspiration she needs. It’s what she loves about the rise of the self-purchasing female – about 80 per cent of her clientele are women, buying for themselves, in the ultimate industry shake-up – and unlike in the past, the jewellery being produced is a direct reflection of what the woman herself likes. Olivia is in regular discussions with customers, whose direct feedback she acts on to create new pieces.

“Matching is no longer relevant. The rules are out. I see lots of women who are very busy with their careers, doctors, and surgeons, and wearing a huge knuckleduster to work during the week isn’t feasible.”

When I ask what’s ahead for the brand, Olivia reveals more appetite to embrace bold colour and a current obsession with peridot – the rare olive-hued stone of meteoric origin – that is likely to spawn a new collection. Her love affair with the necklace will continue (she is of the view that they flatter everybody, while hands are more variable). Come to think of it, I remember likening my own to Shrek’s when my husband proposed to me. “Exactly. I’ve never met a woman who doesn’t criticise her hands,” she says with a laugh.

There might be a move into lifestyle products, and this year she released her first piece for Lunar New Year, a seven-stone horseshoe (an ancient symbol of good fortune) with brilliant, round-cut diamonds and black rhodium, which was well-received. A new charm every year is the idea, dovetailing nicely with her core business of creating pieces that existing clients can build into their collections.

Juggling a busy home life, three children, and an impending move alongside a burgeoning business, Olivia acknowledges that the combination of a strong work ethic, good timing and a genuine love for her craft has all played its part in her brand’s success. And like all grounded entrepreneurs, she knows that sometimes you just get lucky. “I lent the horseshoe prototype to someone I knew so she could take some photos wearing it,” Olivia tells me. “Then she called me, distraught. It had fallen off her neck on the plane.” She reported it missing, but considered the tiny piece gone. The next day, the airline called: someone had handed it in at the airport, five plane rides later. As the saying goes, the harder you work, the luckier you get.



This feature was originally published in VEIL Issue Two. Discover this profile along with many more inspiring stories, weddings, and editorials in the full issue. Purchase your copy here.