Jeweler Kindred Lubeck’s life changed in an instant—and an Instagram post—last August when Travis Kelce proposed to Taylor Swift with an old mine brilliant cut diamond set in a hand-engraved yellow gold band from Lubeck’s brand, Artifex Fine.
Lubeck’s distinctive style—marked by one-of-a-kind antique stones and intricate hand-engraving work—caught Swift’s eye. “I just thought her stuff was so cool,” Swift said on Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Emma Bunton last year. “When I saw the ring, I was like [gasps], ‘I know who made that!’”
While Lubeck’s work is still hard to come by, it just got a little bit easier thanks to her new line, Artifex Bridal by Kindred Lubeck. On April 10 at 4 p.m. EST, Lubeck will drop a new, limited edition collectsion of engagement rings, wedding bands, and other fine jewelry intended to carry a bride through her engagement and beyond. Among them, a wedding band with channel-set baguettes and a milgrain border, a tennis bracelet with a hand-engraved sunburst motif and invisible clasp, and—a favorite of hers—a 3.63 carat old mine diamond surrounded by an engraved halo accented with smaller diamonds, and a looped detail on the band.
While it isn’t a widely available collectsion, the limited edition model will allow would-be customers to access Lubeck’s work without having to join the lengthy waitlist for a custom piece. For now, she plans on doing quarterly drops of around 25 rings. While she will repurpose the designs, every ring will be unique; the body of each ring will be remade to fit a new, hand-selected stone. “We’re not interested in replicating them fully,” she says. “You won’t be meeting someone else who has the exact same ring as you.”
Lubeck decided to launch Artifex Bridal following the enthusiastic response to Swift’s engagement ring. New eyes on her work meant a deluge of interest from Swifties and beyond, but her business wasn’t built to meet that sort of large-scale demand—nor does she want it to. “Mass producing is wholly against the ethos of the brand,” she says. Still, she wanted to expand her bridal business beyond custom pieces, of which she is able to produce about 10 per year. “I’m now at the point where I’m very limited in what I can take [with] my custom commissions,” Lubeck says.
While Lubeck is physically unable to take on more work, she has also grown frustrated with the copycats. “This is mine,” she says. “I should have the ownership of it.” The bridal collectsion helps her offload some of that labor while still ensuring that each ring has a distinctive Kindred Lubeck touch. While Lubeck isn’t able to make every Artifex Bridal ring herself, she chooses each stone and personally trains the jewelers she commissions in her hand-engraving technique.
Artifex Bridal allows Lubeck to take ownership of her work while still maintaining its rarefied status. In a market flooded with cookie-cutter engagement rings, she wants Artifex Bridal’s pieces to capture its wearers’ singularity. “It’s such a special moment to get engaged,” she says. “It fundamentally does not feel right to pick out something that is exactly the same as someone else gets.”
