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PARIS — For Bibi van der Velden, high jewelry is where you can go all in. On Friday, the Dutch jeweler will be finally throwing her hat into this segment that continues to shine even as luxury turned gloomy, with the unveiling of her first high jewelry designs in Amsterdam. “My personal preference, and maybe also talent, lies in more intricate pieces,” she told WWD. “So I was always doing bespoke on the side, where I would get the opportunity to go crazy with big stones, with pieces that would transform.” While fine jewelry with sculptural, organic volumes has remained a main driver for her eponymous brand launched 21 years ago, her clients have had plenty of time to develop a growing appetite for, say, a ring that becomes a necklace, which also detaches to be worn as a bracelet — and most recently, white diamonds galore. “We’ve slowly taken them by the hand, and we’ve gone more extreme as the years went by,” she said. In “Eclipse,” which consists of two six-piece suites, one in all-white diamonds and the other in a delicate gradient that plays on their combination with gray spinels, the jeweler worked around her signature alligator. To her, the reptile is “very much about female empowerment and giving women this edge that we sometimes need.” “I wanted to go in a much more architectural, abstract direction,” she said. Her approach was to “deduct and distill” to reach an outline that “is so clean, very unlike my usual aesthetic” of organic sculptural lines, true to her background in the art form — and her heritage as the daughter of sculptor Michèle Deiters, whom she considers a muse. Cue designs that turn the alligator into articulated geometries that rest against the collarbone, dangle from earlobes or curl around fingers and wrists. Scales are carved into the reverse, while convex earring backs are “a form in itself,” she said. Diamonds are custom-cut in step and baguette shapes to follow each curve, with some pieces in the diamond suite topping the 12-carat mark. She also reached for natural 18-karat white gold, its tone giving more depth than the rhodium-plated finish widely used with the precious metal. Unlike most of the house’s earrings, which are sold as singles, Eclipse’s long earrings come as a pair, retailing around $75,000 to $80,000. “These aren’t one-off pieces,” she noted. “This is a limited numbered edition per design.” Prices of her fine jewelry line start around 1,400 euros for the studs and her recently introduced charms, and go north of 20,000 euros for, say, an open gold bangle shaped like a detailed mermaid’s tail. The bestselling Bite earrings are around 8,000 euros. Bespoke designs start around 25,000 to 30,000 euros. With the Eclipse suites, where pieces come in a limited numbered edition per design, earrings are around the 75,000-euro mark. This is “a stepping stone to what I’m working on, which we want to launch in 2028,” said van der Velden, describing what’s to come as “really out there high jewelry.” To prepare, the brand will spend the next six months sourcing larger single stones for higher-value pieces. Her clientele seems primed for it. Most are women buying for themselves — lawyers, CEOs, entrepreneurs and doctors who are wealthy in their own right. “[They] have a deep knowledge of art and of craftsmanship, and they really devour it,” she said. The business, which her husband Thomas, a lawyer by training, joined six years ago, has “grown incredibly” over the past four or five years and employs 24 people in Amsterdam. It has also shifted toward direct-to-consumer, which now generates roughly 65 percent of sales with the rest from wholesale. Retail is a recent addition for a designer who long resisted it. In October 2025, she opened her first flagship, an 800-square-foot, two-story space in Amsterdam with hidden nooks and crannies. “I’ve always rebelled a little bit against retail,” she said. “Now that we’ve opened Pandora’s box…I love it so much.” In April came Jewels on Wheels, a marquetry cart holding around 30 pieces that roams the Rosewood Amsterdam, followed this summer by a vintage Citroën HY turned traveling vitrine. Next year will bring a pop-up of a few months with a second permanent store slated by the end of 2027. Meanwhile, van der Velden has seen the jewelry market polarize, with “huge growth” in “the higher, crazy one-off pieces” and the more affordable entry segment, while “that mid segment is hurting quite a bit at the moment,” particularly with sustained geopolitical unrest. “This is an industry [where] you feel the ripples of all these world events very, very directly,” she added. Although the company does not share its sales figures, in 2025, which marked the jeweler’s 20th anniversary, its revenue increased by 50 percent. While Europe is home to a growing number of her private clients, the U.S. remains the largest market for the brand, at around 40 percent of sales, and is “definitely not saturated yet,” in her opinion. In the Middle East, the brand is finding traction through trunk shows and private events, with van der Velden feeling that “the discovery part is very integral” to the brand experience. Next up is Asia, where the brand will focus its high and fine jewelry expansion in 2027, targeting Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo, Shanghai and Seoul, markets where demand for higher-value pieces is often hampered by tariffs and import rules. Whatever the market, the approach stays the same. “What I like to think about us as a brand is that we do things in a fun and a different way,” said van der Velden. “It’s not so serious and corporate.”