When she was 5 years old Kia Schwaninger designed her first piece of jewelry, a refined necklace of royal-blue polymer clay beads that was for her mother.
“I guess that was my first commission,” the Swiss-born designer who now lives and works in Brooklyn said as a joke. Her mother still has the necklace.
Ms. Schwaninger, 42, has been serious about jewelry design ever since. After training in metalsmithing during her teen years, she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in jewelry and metalsmithing from the Rhode Island School of Design, completed a design internship at Tiffany & Company and received a Master of Arts in Design and Applied Arts at the Creative Academy, a program in Milan founded by Richemont, the Swiss luxury group whose jewelry houses include Cartier and Van Cleef & Arpels.
It was Van Cleef’s president and chief executive, Nicolas Bos, who spotted her talent at the academy and later hired her as a junior designer. “She has an engineer’s mind-set and is very precise, but also has real creativity and a touch of whimsicality,” Mr. Bos said.
She spent 10 years working for the French jeweler in Paris and then New York, where she rose to a senior designer post. “She created a legacy of her work in the Van Cleef collection,” he said, “some of which still remains today.”
