About

I have always loved jewelry.

Growing up in Palm Beach Gardens, I spent my weekends (and most weekdays, honestly) at the Gardens Mall with my grandmother — also Catherine Peck, who I was named for. Claire’s was the first stop, for obvious reasons. I got my ears pierced there when I was eight and never really stopped wearing sparkle after that. When Claire’s started feeling too disposable, we’d walk past Tiffany’s instead. I loved Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I dreamed about a future Tiffany’s engagement ring the way other kids dreamed about being astronauts.

Tiffany’s kept showing up at the milestones. When I got my first period at eleven, my grandma gave me an Elsa Peretti sterling heart ring. For my seventeenth birthday, a platinum diamond bow necklace. I still wear both.

I come from a long line of Catherines. My great-great-grandmother was Caterina. My mother’s middle name is Catherine. My grandmother is Catherine Peck. My daughter was born on my grandmother’s 92nd birthday — so she’s Catherine, too. Some of the pieces have come down through that line: Caterina’s wedding band (solid 14k yellow gold, carved with a floral motif, engraved with their initials and the year, 1896) and my great-grandmother’s vintage Corum Ingot — a small 18k gold bar watch with a diamond on the dial.

The piece I aspire to but don’t own is my grandmother’s. My grandfather bought it for her in the New York diamond district about a decade into their marriage. Fourteen carats. Natural. We were at a party once and a woman gasped, grabbed her hand, asked her how many carats and whether it was real. My grandmother was mortified. I think about that moment constantly. It’s everything jewelry can be at once: meaningful, beautiful, private, and impossible to keep entirely to yourself.

So diamonds have always been part of my story.

I started this house in 2024, the year my marriage ended. I needed something to occupy my time, and I’d been watching the entrepreneurial itch I’ve always had ebb back into focus.

There was a more honest reason, too. There’s this strange cultural thing around women and jewelry — where it’s somehow more acceptable for a man to buy a woman jewelry than for a woman to just buy it for herself. I’d spent years catching myself feeling sheepish about my own taste. Embarrassed, even, every time I considered buying something for myself. Which is a strange thing to do with the first part of yourself you can remember loving.

All of this was happening at the same time as fine jewelry, quietly, was becoming more accessible. Lab diamonds had started taking over the category. Designer pieces were suddenly possible at prices they hadn’t been five years earlier. The world was opening up while I was making myself smaller about something I should have just been allowed to enjoy.

Once I was divorced, I realized I could just buy the diamonds I wanted. Very Miley Cyrus of me, I know.

That experience is also why this house exists in the shape it does. The whole idea that fine jewelry has to mean 18k, natural, certified, and gated by paperwork — that idea is part of what kept a lot of women (me included) waiting to be given something instead of buying it for themselves. Catherine Peck is built on the opposite premise. 10k gold, because it wears better and keeps the pieces in reach. Lab and natural stones, both, evaluated on what the stone actually is. Imperfections kept when they’re interesting — a freckle in a diamond is just where the light catches differently. A diamond is a diamond. None of it should be a gate, and none of it should make a woman feel embarrassed for loving jewelry, or for buying it for herself.

That impulse became this house. Catherine Peck Fine Jewelry is partly an homage to my (very much still living, very much still glamorous) grandmother — the New Jersey-to-Palm Beach snowbird, the socialite in her own right, the woman who taught me what jewelry was actually for. I want this house to read a little like her: elegant, considered, slightly intimidating from outside, entirely warm once you’re in.

But I’m not my grandmother. My energy is whimsical, feminine in the playful sense, more likely to put a heart-cut diamond on a pinky ring than she would ever be. Catherine Peck Fine Jewelry is what happens when those two registers sit next to each other — her elegance and my play. Real fine jewelry, set with diamonds and gemstones (natural or lab), in 10k gold, so the pieces are durable enough to actually live in. Fine, but down to earth. Like her. Like me. Like the brand.

That’s the long version. The short version is that I’m doing this because I love it, because I finally can, and because I want every woman who finds her way here to feel the same way.

— Catherine