Passion helps 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 FILE 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 FILE PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

From an early age, the glimmer of vintage jewelry captured 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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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 relocated 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 what she wanted in life.

“Being a military wife was hard,” she said. “I would always be following him and not be able to make a name for myself.”

In 2005, 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.

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.

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