Roberta Friedman Designs a New Life

It was almost fifteen years into her teaching career as an elementary school teacher that White Plains resident Roberta Friedman took a sabbatical. While attending classes in music and art at College of New Rochelle during sabbatical, Roberta noticed many students on campus were wearing little beaded bracelets which, as she recalls, "were really hard to close." Roberta believed she had the artistic eye to create a more beautiful design than what was the trend. Little did she know at the time, a career change was about to occur, and she would become a bridge jewelry designer with an international presence.

Bridge jewelry is the term used for jewelry designed with semi-precious stones such as jade and turquoise, while fine jewelry incorporates precious stones such as diamonds and emeralds, and costume jewelry uses plastic or glass. About 42% of jewelry sales in America are made up of bridge jewelry, which is usually found in high-end gift shops, galleries and department stores.

While off from class at CNR, Roberta, on a whim, took a train into Grand Central Terminal, walked up to 47th street and, as Roberta explains it, “with no direction of what to do, I just walked in and started to buy semi-precious beads from wholesalers. I got back home and started putting together these bracelets with larger sized-stones, but with the same hard to close clasps because I didn’t know differently -- yet.”

First sales were to her friends. As she got better at designing and stringing, she moved on to bigger beads. She also learned about a district in lower Manhattan which provided an overwhelming diversity of semi-precious stones which burst her mind with creativity. When she began creating her designs, Chinese antiquities were not as common as they are today. Roberta would go downtown to search through bins of grey, red and brown, carnelian, carved jades, serpentine, and antique Chinese silver. She learned about the varying tones of stone color. The wholesale shops provided her with an education to finding that one-of-a –kind piece to use in her individual designs, which grew to include earrings and necklaces.

When her sabbatical was almost over, Roberta fully intended to go back to teaching, but the creativity she had begun to experience was too strong to tame. After springing her dream for a career change on her husband, and weighing the financial situation of a new career, her creative passion won; Roberta evolved from educator to designer.

Armed with a box of her new creations, Roberta walked into Bloomingdales in White Plains, and asked to see the jewelry buyer. Back then according to Roberta, “you could just walk into a department store to sell. Today it is practically unheard of.” Not only did she make her first sale to a major department store that day, but she also made a contact; her first representative who would go on to sell Roberta’s jewelry designs throughout the country. After a few years, her business began to grow, and she hired a staff to help string her designs, package and send out shipments worldwide.

You may not always know if you are wearing a Roberta Freidman design, for most major stores and catalogs such as Travel Smith advertise her designs as their own exclusives. This is a common practice in the industry that Roberta has learned to live with. In smaller boutiques, her label is usually displayed.

Throughout the country, major department stores and catalogues are placing new demands on businesses, requiring packaging standards, which are proving too costly for the small business owner. Some of her clients now require that she package and display her designs inside a box put together within stringent size and shape parameters. To keep her designs creative, and not have to conform within the box, Roberta has chosen to evolve back to her roots, creating designs on consignment for individuals and small boutiques, which welcome individuality in design.

After years of looking down at the stones on a table to create a design, Roberta’s artistic eye has wandered upward. Her artistic intuition is moving forward in a new direction. Interior design placement, or re-placement as Roberta calls it. She enjoys walking into a home and re-designing with the furniture and tchotchkes you already own. Her goal is to help someone refresh a tired look. So far her interior design clients have been friends, but then again, so were the people who first wore her tiny beaded bracelets.

Adrienne Pincus, February 2006