Jewellery brand Haricot Vert’s world in miniature

Searching for “haricot vert” on Google will result in a sea of green bean recipes and dictionary entries. Among them, you’ll also find the website of Haricot Vert, a Brooklyn-based jewellery brand that has little to do with vegetables.

“It’s a little reminder that life is really silly, a reminder for me to keep things simple and not take life too seriously,” says founder Kelsey Armstrong, 27, of the name, which is French for green beans. “When we have a bad day at the studio, we just think about green beans and it’s hard not to laugh.”

This playfulness infuses Armstrong’s designs, which include bracelets, necklaces, earrings and key chains decorated with little charms depicting everyday objects, body parts, food, animals and much more.

Officially called Picto-Charms (a name she trademarked), these little trinkets are handcrafted from vintage magazine cut-outs, old ads and photographs that are scanned, shrunk and turned into ornaments made of plastic material. The Apéro Hour dangle pack of earrings (£103, haricot vert.shop), for example, is a collection of five earrings, each carrying a miniature rendition of an appetiser food that might complement a cocktail, including a baguette, a sardine, stuffed olives, a prawn, a gherkin and a chilli pepper.  

Armstrong’s charms, which number in the hundreds, can be romantic (a mini CD inscribed with the words “you are the only thing in life that I got right”, a “PS I love you” note), mundane (a New York metro card, a pigeon, a bagel), edgy (parted red lips enclosing a cherry, a Prozac pill, a packet of cigarettes) or tongue in cheek (a heart-shaped steak, a bin with the words “ur opinion”). What they have in common is a nostalgic aura and a sentimental yet whimsical spirit that recalls children or teenagers’ jewellery: pieces that might not be materially precious but hold a lot of meaning.

The brand taps into Gen Z’s penchant for personalisation. Alongside collections and pieces designed by Armstrong, shoppers can also create their own designs by combining different charms (from £20 for a clip-on charm) or turn a picture of a pet into their own Picto-Pet ornament (£48).

“A charm on its own, it’s just a charm, but when you put them together in a pair of dangles or a necklace, you’re telling a little story,” says Armstrong, who likes to describe her designs as “wearable poetry”. 

One of her collections, called Night in Paris, was inspired by her time in the French capital, where she moved after high school to study international business and marketing and get a minor in fine arts. “It was like a little diary entry of my time in Paris, the afternoons that I spent [there], the food that I ate and the people that I met,” she says. “If you are customising it, you are picking things that are relevant to you and your life, and when you put them all together you are telling the story of you.” 

The result is often “a nostalgic story that brings you back. The brand in general tries to bring people back to that childhood wonderment, and nostalgia of looking back at your life.”

My eyes are always bigger than my stomach: I have a lot of dreams and ideas but sometimes I don’t realise how much work is behind them

Armstrong, who describes herself as someone with “a very entrepreneurial spirit”, started to experiment with jewellery and collages in 2019. With no previous training in the field, she learnt most of her skills from YouTube, old jewellery-making books and content creators on Instagram. Perfecting the process was “a lot of trial and error”, but the pandemic, which hit shortly after she started, gave her plenty of time to work on it (the process is also proprietary). 

Images of her first collections took off on Instagram and Pinterest, and soon Armstrong had to quit her full-time job in marketing and events at the French-American Chamber of Commerce. “People were racing to buy pieces and interest grew to a point where I understood I needed people to help me,” she says. Today she works with a team of 17 women in a space in Brooklyn that functions as a production centre, retail store and office. Armstrong opened it in April.

“My eyes are always bigger than my stomach: I have a lot of dreams and ideas but sometimes I don’t realise how much work is behind them,” she says of embarking on her retail journey. For an emerging brand such as Haricot Vert, premises can be a significant cost to shoulder, especially as Armstrong says she is completely self-funded. “It was a huge undertaking, but the fact that we combined our office with our production facility and store made it a lot more feasible financially.”

The store allowed her to set up a “craft programme”, which includes collage, mixed media and sewing workshops, as well as an area where shoppers can make their own pieces (the brand also sells jewellery-making kits and stickers and collage packs). For Armstrong, it’s all part of creating a community around Haricot Vert, something that today’s shoppers especially appreciate. “Obviously we have a product to sell and bills to pay, but we also wanted to inspire our audience. We really wanted to create a space for collective creation.”

After New York’s Museum of Modern Art commissioned Haricot Vert for an exclusive, New York-inspired collection that is sold in the MoMA gift shop (from £54), Armstrong has started conversations with other museums across the US, institutions with which she believes the brand can “do a lot of storytelling”. She is also looking for retail global partners in her largest markets and has recently teased the release of Haricot Vert’s garments. But there is no rush. 

“For now, we are just trying to meet client demand, our production has been backed up for basically the past year,” she says. “I want to make sure that we can ship things on time and keep things in order before we start expanding like crazy.”

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @financialtimesfashion on Instagram — and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen