Her Great-Grandfather Founded a Jewelry Dynasty. She’s Building Something It Never Had.
The polishers go fishing on their lunch break. This is the first thing to understand about the place where Haverhill Leach makes her jewelry. In a low building on the
Leach is the fifth generation of a jewelry family, which makes her, by the usual arithmetic, a member of the dynasty. By her own accounting, she is nothing of the kind. The dynasty is real, though, and more storied than she lets on. Her great-great-grandfather, Edwin Leach, launched jewelry ventures in Brooklyn in the 1880s before founding Leach & Miller in Attleboro, Massachusetts—a house remembered for its sterling silver, Swarovski crystal and early hand in Art Deco jewelry. Even before Edwin’s death in 1915, his son Edwin Francis Leach had struck out on his own, founding Leach & Garner in 1899 at 23 years old—a separate venture built with a factory partner and backed by the Garner family as investors. Leach & Miller carried on under family succession after Edwin’s death, producing Art Deco pieces until it closed in the early 1930s. Leach & Garner, meanwhile, grew over the following century into a household name in jewelry manufacturing—the maker of the clasps, earring wires, bindings and beads that are the unglamorous bones of the trade. Haverhill’s grandfather, Philip Leach, joined in 1938 and took the presidency in the mid-1960s; Haverhill’s father, Edwin F. “Ted” Leach II, came aboard in 1972 and later spent more than 25 years hosting his own jewelry show on QVC. The family sold the company in 2007 to Cookson Group, a British precious metals company—a decision that looks, in retrospect, like prescience.
Her father had received warnings in late 2006 from two contacts in the gold-lending business that American banks were heading for serious trouble; he believed them, put the business on the market that December, and was vindicated when the 2008 financial crisis froze the overnight funding a precious metals operation like Leach & Garner required to hedge gold. He deliberately chose a British buyer, confident that Cookson drew on different funding sources and that what his family had built since 1899 would survive the transfer. Cookson was later acquired by Richline Group, a Berkshire Hathaway company. That is how a family business founded in Attleboro, Massachusetts, in 1899 ended up under the Berkshire Hathaway umbrella—and why, by the time Haverhill sat down to design, the business was no longer theirs to hand over to her.
What she is, more precisely, is a fifth-generation name and a first-generation jeweler—and the gap between those two things is her story. She came to the craft sideways, late, and almost by accident. Leach studied at Syracuse and the London College of Fashion, designed handbags at Kate Spade, then decamped to Los Angeles to launch a swimwear line built on the vintage textiles she loved—a real business, with real press, sold into Anthropologie and Saks. Two babies in quick succession and the 2008 collapse of the department-store order book ended it. Leach was in labor with her second child when she shipped her final swimwear delivery.
Her father, who had moved from manufacturing to television and was developing a sterling-silver-and-gemstone concept for QVC to follow his long-running yellow-gold show, asked his daughter to sketch a few ideas. She sat down at her dining room table and did not get up for most of the night; the designs flooded out. She faxed the sketches to her father and hasn’t stopped designing since. “I start sketching, and the designs evolve into new designs, and they keep evolving, evolving, evolving,” she says. Leach talks the way she designs, one thing running into the next—her own gold stacked at the throat, the overall effect less boardroom than beachside, warm and without performance. “I think I have too many designs.”
Leach had watched women try on her swimsuits and emerge from the dressing room, sometimes, in tears; watching them try on jewelry was different. “They lit up. I wanted to be part of that.”
Her family never pressed. Her mother—an interior designer of confident, maximalist taste—had raised Leach to forge her own path. And so she did, building something her four jeweler forebears never had: a direct, made-to-order brand designed from a woman’s point of view, each piece keyed to a birth, a loss, a marriage, a child. What she took from her family was the manufacturing instinct. Her father ran a plant with well over a thousand employees and kept his own office inside it, walking the floor, on the theory that the people designing the work and the people making it should be able to see one another. His daughter built her shop the same way.
“I don’t know that we would be able to do this in another state,” Leach says. Rhode Island is where the skill pooled and, unlike almost everywhere else in America, never fully drained away. For two centuries, the region was a center of American jewelry manufacturing—a distinction that traces to a Providence silversmith named Nehemiah Dodge, whose work with plated gold in the late eighteenth century made ornament affordable for ordinary people and seeded an industry. Globalization thinned it brutally—state figures put manufacturing employment, the bulk of it jewelry, at over 40,000 in the late 1970s and under 6,000 by 2015—but it did not vanish.
When Leach needs a polisher, she can find a polisher. A nearby Tiffany manufacturing operation feeds her a steady supply of trained benchworkers. She has hired fathers and sons because the trade still passes here from one generation to the next in basements and at home workbenches. The capstone of that pipeline arrived in late 2025 in the form of Wayne Carvalho, a master jeweler with more than 50 years in the trade. Carvalho trained at Tiffany & Co. and spent 17 years as director of new product development at C&J Jewelry, where he ran the company’s dedicated Tiffany production cell; he now serves as Haverhill’s head of product development and quality control, making samples and setting the standard by which every piece is measured. Leach has been able to staff a quality-control operation she rates, without flinching, against Tiffany’s own. She is not alone in the rediscovery—Tiffany, David Yurman and Shinola have all manufactured in the state during its slow Made-in-America revival, drawn by a quality and a proximity to New York that the cheapest overseas factories could never match, at a cost premium that has narrowed to something like 20 percent.
Imported jewelry now faces a punishing, unpredictable tariff regime, with duties that, in the steepest cases, have run into the triple digits, while the price of gold fluctuates between record highs and near-record highs, and domestic fine jewelry prices are forecast to climb by roughly a third. A brand that kept every step of production on a Rhode Island harbor suddenly looks less sentimental than strategic. Leach will not oversell it. She did not build a factory to win a trade war she could not have predicted; she built it because an outside manufacturer, however fast, was a layer between her and the work.
Because everything is made to order under one roof, Haverhill can turn a personalized piece in about three days, faster than the industry thought possible. The speed is not a logistics achievement so much as an emotional one. Leach learned this when she was still the woman answering the phones. A customer would call, needing a push present before a birth that had been moved up by two weeks; a stone would have to be swapped from a September sapphire to an August peridot because the baby came early. And once, a man called to say he was meeting his daughter the next day for the first time in 30 years, having given her up for adoption, and he wanted a birthstone necklace in hand when he did. No importer makes that necklace in three days, and no importer’s benchworker ever hears why it matters.
When her jewelers know a piece marks a death or a birth, Leach says, plainly, “the love is infused in the product.” She feels it in her own family. Her aunt, who lost a son, told Leach she had always found birthstones a little cheesy—until she caught herself reaching for the bracelet with his birthstone to feel close to him. And Leach, designing a new signet engraved with a birth flower, chose lily of the valley—not because of any month but because it grew in her grandmother’s garden. She engraved it, she realized later, on her grandmother’s birthday. Days afterward, on a family text chain, someone listed the things that reminded them of the woman: lily of the valley. Recounting this, she gets teary. She looks away briefly, toward the harbor, and the easy, additive flow she has kept up drops away. She goes quiet and exact. The thing the business turned out to be about had caught her entirely off guard.
It also explains the house style, which is polished but unfussy with a clean, wear-it-to-the-beach restraint. Leach is her own best advertisement. Loose, undone blonde hair and her own delicate gold layered close to the skin, a bezel-set solitaire on a fine chain, the Warren ring stacked with a plain band. The jewelry stays quiet, she says, precisely so it can hold its own against the loud, eclectic prints she likes to wear—the same instinct that runs through her mother’s rooms. The most credible thing a jeweler can do is wear the work.
Leach was raised to do anything but the family trade, and she has ended up its most personal practitioner. She designs for permanence because she designs for wear, testing every piece on herself for months and building her line in modular parts that recombine, she says, “like Legos.” Her insight about what actually gets passed down is sharp: the heirlooms we reach for are the ones we watched on our mother’s or grandmother’s skin, because the memory of the piece in motion is what makes it worth wearing. The jewelry that survives is not the most valuable, but the most worn.
Which returns us to the harbor, and the polishers, and what a jewelry town is actually for. The case for American manufacturing is usually made in the language of the spreadsheet—jobs, tariffs, supply-chain resilience, the 20-percent premium narrowing toward zero. The reason to keep the work here, in Leach’s telling, is not that it is cheaper or even safer. It is that the meaning lives in the proximity, and the proximity lives in Rhode Island, for a reason no economist would put on the ledger. People light up. And someone within walking distance of the
