PRESS

• NICHE Magazine, Winter 2006

• W. Jewelry, Spring 2006

Fitz & Fitz Jewelry
By Sara Jerome

For most people, the soapstone fragments left over from Somers Randolph’s carved sculptures wouldn’t hold much potential. For his wife Hillary they equaled a successful business.

Hillary was dating Somers when she discovered the trunk in his Santa Fe, N.M., studio. For years, Somers had amused himself by whittling leftover scraps, creating hundreds of miniature sculptures. Hillary, coming from a fashion background in fast-paced New York, looked through the tiny musings and saw a ring, a necklace and a pendant. “I had never seen anything like them before,” she says. “Neither had anyone else.”

And so Fitz & Fitz Jewelry was born. Since the fragile soapstone would easily crumble if worn, Hillary had the pieces cast in solid sterling silver and gold. Today, with five years of marriage behind them, the Randolphs have amassed a full collection of pendants, earrings, bracelets, rings, cufflinks and belt buckles, introducing a dozen or so new pieces every year. Each piece is given a woman’s name, a tradition that began when Hillary named the first few after her closest girlfriends.

“I’ve spent my life in pursuit of form,” says Somers, who continues to create large, one-of-a-kind sculptures in addition to collaborating with Hillary on new jewelry pieces. “I try to make each piece perfect in relationship to itself. Balance, proportion, weight, motion and silhouette are a complicated set of conditions to arrange.”

Somers’ greatest satisfaction had always come during his “aha” moments, when a new idea struck. That changed when their daughter Comfort, now 3 years old, came along.
“I didn’t expect to ever experience joy greater than those moments of pure inspiration, and she makes that possible,” he says.

And the couple is at no loss for new ideas, with a backlog of 200 or 300 shapes just waiting to be cast into wearable pieces. “My forms seem to know where they’re going,” Somers says.