Lifelong passion helps Loren Hope sparkle

RAY OF HOPE: Loren Hope Designs LLC founder and Creative Director Loren Barham, left, and assistant Maggie Ferri examine glass for new designs. / PBN PHOTO/?MICHAEL SALERNO
RAY OF HOPE: Loren Hope Designs LLC founder and Creative Director Loren Barham, left, and assistant Maggie Ferri examine glass for new designs. / PBN PHOTO/?MICHAEL SALERNO

From an early age, the glimmer of vintage jewelry captured 30-year-old Loren Barham’s attention, but the link between artistry and entrepreneurship wasn’t always clear to her.

“My aunt gave me a little jewelry-making kit when I was 12, with natural gemstones and beads,” Barham recalled, “and I made my first pair of earrings. I used to go to yard sales with my Gramma. It was always the gold rhinestone jewelry that was so sparkly.”

Today, Barham is founder and creative director of Loren Hope Designs LLC. The hand-crafted jewelry she makes is produced in Rhode Island.

The Willow Springs, N.C., native brought her husband, Aaron, in from a military career in the Air Force and literally “helping out at the kitchen table” to being CEO, she said.

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The company doesn’t disclose sales figures, but has “grown five times over” since basing the work in Rhode Island, Barham said.

Her products – handmade and soldered, geometrically configured, modern interpretations of bracelets, earrings and necklaces inspired by vintage jewelry – are sold on the website www.lorenhope.com. They’re also sold in 170 boutiques across the country, including four new outlets in Rhode Island that agreed in March to feature the work, she said.

The company is growing fast enough that it has gone from two employees to 10 and has relocated from an office at Lorraine Mills in Pawtucket, which opened in February 2013, to a 3,200-square-foot space in Greenwich Mills in January at 42 Ladd St. in East Greenwich, she said.

Barham attributes the professional growth to many common attributes of entrepreneurs, including risk-taking, being savvy in the use of social media, flexibility, trusting her intuition and being authentic. But that growth actually came at a pivotal times in her life.

She grew in confidence once she admitted to herself that the role she was fulfilling at an Air Force base in England as a military wife was not the primary role she wanted in life.

“Being a military wife was hard,” she said, “not being home [in the U.S.] and knowing if Aaron was to be pursuing a military career, I would always be following him and not be able to make a name for myself. I wasn’t Loren anymore; I was Lt. Barham’s wife.”

Reclaiming her identity, she decided not to work on the base but instead create work of her own.

So, in 2005, despite having left art school at East Carolina University, she took a $5,000 gift from her grandmother that had been sitting in a savings account and decided to invest it in a fledgling sole proprietorship for her jewelry-making passion. She might not have, had it not been for her father-in-law, Rick Barnham, who advised her.

“He spoke to me one day and said, ‘You’re young. You don’t have any kids. You don’t have a lot to lose,’ ” she said.

She and Aaron moved back to the United States in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area in the summer of 2006 and gave the beads and stones a studio of their own. One day, instead of a typical $300 sale, a friend who managed a local boutique said the owner wanted to buy all the samples Barham had shown – about $2,000 worth. The sale was a turning point and underscored the value of the enterprise she was gradually building.

By 2010, the couple had built a house in Pittsboro, N.C., and as her jewelry-making sideline took off, she was exposed to stones and other materials from Rhode Island.

On New Year’s Day in 2013, she and Aaron drove to Providence to visit a local shop. They were smitten.

They soon got an apartment in Providence and rented out their home in Pittsboro, N.C., she said.

Aaron, who had helped pack orders and make bracelets in the past, has strong leadership skills, so he assumed responsibility for logistics, pricing and shipments.

In March 2013, the couple hired their first employee, who is still with the company, Barham said. She has learned to stay true to her strengths by ceding a level of company control to Aaron, and focusing on being a designer, which is how she developed her products in the first place, she said.

Pursuit of the business has not been without complications, however. Once Barham learned about the potential for sales at trade shows instead of directly through stores, she found a showroom in Atlanta that carried clothing and picked up her line. The professional relationship brought the brand much-needed exposure in the retail market, but that relationship disintegrated.

Yet, that, too, taught her to trust her instincts, she said.

“It’s [about] being willing to try different things and seeing if something works,” she noted. “And if it works, you’re willing to do something more, and if something doesn’t work, you let it go.” •

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