Crooked Howlet Designs (CHD), the jewellery label based out of Sydney, Australia.

After it’s conception on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, the HQ and production studio, where every CHD piece is produced, is currently situated in the Inner West, Sydney.

The small team of jewellers and designers, has helped evolve a style with the roots in rock music, the punk subculture, old-hand skullduggery and ancient metal work, whilst brewing a unique approach to traditional signet jewellery. Giving a nod to the core imagery, yet with a modern accessibility of clean lines and a subtle approach to the roots in which we derive our style.

We hunt to be the King Of The Signets. The traditional signet jewellery style that is handed down through the generations needs to begin somewhere and we hope our designs are the start of an heirloom.

An essential ingredient for our designs to hit heirloom status and be handed down from generation to generation, is our exclusivity of the limited edition monthly pieces - in which we have three new pieces each month, sold for that month only.

Feeding off the exclusivity of limited collections and unique designs, our final touch to bring a true lasting significance is; our Crooked Howlet Designs Ring Library. The bison leather ring bible, kept in our HQ, is a record of every piece we have ever produced. Your ring has a record of when it was cast, what design and for who it was made, and what city it was then shipped off too. The legacy of your piece will remain in the Ring Library for your grandkids to see.

Accessories are a funny item to categorise, especially as the value of the piece will build over time, as it seems to gather stories along with you. We are just a vehicle for you to create a legacy. Find Yours…

Head Designer; Ryan Purdie-Smith. 

Going through the process of introspectively assessing my own design style and then verbalising this, is probably a good approach for further inspiration, however not an easy task. I’ll speak to what I love and therefore, where subconsciously a lot of my design style would come from. 

I’ve seemed to always find love for design in bizarre places, such as old packaging artwork. There’s an element of attraction to these as I feel they don’t gain the appreciation they should. Take old Safety Match boxes; the obsolete nature of these products usually renders them somewhat unappreciated, but when you look deep into this world and the artwork was the single thing standing between them and a sale, some of the design was amazing. This was the basis behind our rendition on vintage Safety Match boxes and Cigarette Boxes with CHD artist Nick Potts.This lens through which I view design, directed my sights to traditional tattoo design, which is peppered throughout our collection. Traditional tattoo design and vintage packaging/logo design, I feel are bread from the same cloth and I wanted to somehow hitch a ride on this style.  

To tie this back to CHD, my appreciation for traditionalism, especially within old signets, matched with my love for rock/metal music, the punk subculture and traditional tattoo design, birthed our collection. I can appreciate that some bolder designs ideas may not have that accessibility of an everyday piece, so a stripping back the potency of some designs and letting the fundamentals of the ring do the heavy lifting.

As most ‘art’ will, I see our designs continuing to evolve further still, yet hopefully still answering some fundamental principles they I keep to be universal and timeless.