A Brooklyn Jewelry Brand Takes Flight

On an afternoon this spring, Rony Elka Vardi and Leigh Batnick Plessner stood outside the Bedford Avenue storefront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that for years was a location of their jewelry boutique, Catbird. The cramped space, now a cafe serving coffee and Argentine pastries, has little more than 200 square feet.

“It’s even tiny for a coffee shop,” Ms. Vardi, 54, said.

Catbird opened at that location in 2006, about two years after Ms. Vardi started the company. But over the course of a decade, it outgrew the tiny shop. In 2022, Ms. Vardi and Ms. Batnick Plessner started selling Catbird’s selection of itty-bitty, layerable jewelry at a nearby space in Williamsburg about 10 times the size. By then they had also opened a store in downtown Manhattan; last year, they opened a second, in Rockefeller Center.

Soon after came locations in Boston, Los Angeles and Washington. There are plans to open a San Francisco store this August and Catbird is aiming to open 10 more locations in places like Atlanta and Chicago by 2026, further expanding the national footprint of what has mostly remained a cult brand.

To walk into a Catbird store is to enter a world where jewelry and fashionable knickknacks from the brand and other makers are displayed alongside prim trappings like starched white-lace curtains, antique furniture, overgrown house plants and smoky, slightly crooked mirrors.

Rony Elka Vardi, a founder of Catbird, right, and her husband, David Weeks, outside the brand’s first store on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, in 2004. It moved to a space on Bedford Avenue in 2006 before relocating to a much larger location in the neighborhood in 2022.Credit…Catbird