Faraone Mennella, Jewellery & the City

Twenty years ago, Roberto Faraone Mennella and Amedeo Scognamiglio created a high-end jewellery brand of admirable craftsmanship based on pictorial chromatic harmonies made possible by perfect stones. Works imbued with creative energy, dedicated to women of great character like the central characters of “Sex & the City”.

By Marilde Motta | On PRINTlovers #86 

With them, among the first to wear Roberto and Amedeo’s creations, the Faraone Mennella brand finds its full consecration and becomes the object of desire of a new generation of strong-willed women. Jewels that go beyond the ornamental function that live in symbiosis with the wearer and support every moment. Joyful, vibrant with light, tender, allusive, vital. There are so many adjectives that describe sets and individual pieces.
What could ever be the container for these jewels?
Amedeo Scognamiglio explains how cultural legacies, even among cosmopolitan people, remain strong and how a small bag can be the equivalent of the most elaborate box. The Faraone Mennella brand’s institutional packaging declares its identity and mood, following a casual aesthetic, pure lines and light strokes, the same that guided the design of the logo. A soft, whispered aura as if suggested in a friend’s ear.

Can I define the jewellery style of Roberto Faraone Mennella and Amedeo Scognamiglio as exclamation points in your biography?
The creative history of Faraone Mennella is symbiotically linked to our lives lived together in search of a dream to be made real: we learned together when we were very young the stylistic codes of what, years later, would become the DNA of the brand we imagined. Roberto and I lived a wonderful story of love and friendship, building by ourselves and almost by osmosis our own personal creative reality, which then became an international entrepreneurial success. Our customers approach the brand because they want to enter a world of dreams that we have painted with jewellery. Jewellery is just the creative tool we have chosen to materialize our personal image of the Italian luxury lifestyle.

How do you research shapes and materials, colour combinations and materials? What guides your inspiration?
Our inspiration always comes from ideas related to our ideal holidays or those of our customers. We have never started to create a new object with a simple sketch on a sheet of paper; that comes later, but before we get to the drawing, there are long conversations, on a plane, or walking around New York late at night, wondering what our client will wear on holiday in Capri, or what necklace or earrings she needs for the next charity event. The collections start from dreams, our own and those of our Muses. Each piece in production on the bench always has a name attached to it; we imagine it for one of our Muses, even if she doesn’t know it yet and even if she won’t be the final buyer. The important thing is always to imagine who will wear that new ring, as in a luxurious dream-like journey.

What line of thought went into the distinctive graphic signs of the logo?
Simplicity. Roberto, a graduate in Design Marketing from the Parsons School in NYC, was very careful about the brand’s visual communication, and the logo had to represent the maximum expression of simplicity of lines and colours - his beloved light grey. The idea was not to overburden the logo, which was already quite long and ‘’heavy’’ in its duality. Especially considering the natural explosion of colours and shapes of our jewellery, the logo just has to be a discreet echo of the designers.

Packaging is both the messenger of the brand and the custodian of the content. How was the packaging designed for your collections?
For the packaging, from the very beginning, we followed a traditional luxury idea; our jewellery is a valuable work of art, so the packaging had to be rich, luxurious, old school. We relied on a ‘Made in Italy’ company. They immediately understood the ethos of the brand and were able to create jewellery boxes for us that were at the same time ‘classic’ in shape, like crown jewellery, but fresh and contemporary in our colours (in different shades of grey), alternating traditional materials like leather with linen, which is less usual.

What do your customers expect from your packaging?
Generally speaking, American luxury customers are more “practical” - they like a chic velvet pouch much more than a well-built box made of wood and fine fabrics. The opposite is true for Russian-speaking and Middle Eastern customers, for whom the box is often more important than the jewellery itself.

Was the choice of packaging local or global?
We have always been natural ambassadors of “Made in Italy”, so our sources are always and only Italian, out of personal feeling, parochialism and the highest quality that we only find in Italy. But it is also important for the brand’s storytelling to communicate the Italian character of the product, from the jewellery to the packaging itself.

A famous brand often provokes attempts at illegal imitation. Packaging can offer anti-counterfeiting solutions. What systems have you adopted?
Our production is very limited and exclusive, just as our customers in the high-end jewellery sector are very limited and exclusive. So for the moment, we do not feel the need to protect ourselves in such an advanced way from that point of view. We remain artisans.

What role does heritage play in the affirmation of a brand? How is it told and transmitted?
By family tradition, I have always been the one of the two most attentive to heritage and the storytelling of the generations of experience behind me. Because having experienced it since I was a child, I have always protected that treasure trove of information and history contained in two hundred years of craftsmanship in the same family. But, now that Faraone Mennella is preparing to celebrate 20 years since its birth, I would like to tell its story and that of Roberto and myself, as the beginning of a legacy that will continue in the coming decades with and without me; and also as a tribute to the life and talent of Roberto, who continues to guide me from up there. In fact, I am working on a book about our personal and professional history because perhaps there is more meaning in our journey than in the jewellery itself.