She designed Taylor Swift’s engagement ring. Business is booming.

Kindred Lubeck was sitting in the studio in 2020, working on a silver piece, when the jewelry maker sitting next to her asked, "So, what do you want to do with this?

- Lane Florsheim

Just three years after starting her label, Kindred Lubeck made the most famous ring of the year.

(AFP)

She was 25 at the time, and metalwork was just a hobby. Still, she recalled telling him, "I want to see my name in lights,' verbatim. And he said to me, 'You'll never be the next big jewelry designer.'"

Hearing her tell this story, you wish you could have seen the look on the guy's face on Aug. 26. When Taylor Swift shared a closeup of her ring in an Instagram post announcing her engagement, it didn't take long for Swifties to trace the engraved yellow-gold ring to Lubeck. Three years after launching her independent label, Artifex Fine, Lubeck designed the most famous ring of the-year? Decade? Century? And without traditional marketing, ad campaigns or gifts to influencers or celebrities.

"I think there was an element of me that was like, 'Really? Me?'" Lubeck, now 30, says in an interview at her airy studio in New York's Long Island City.

In a radio interview, Swift said she'd shown Travis Kelce a video made by Lubeck a year and a half before their engagement. "I just thought her stuff was so cool," she says. "And he was paying attention to everything, it turns out. When I saw the ring, I was like, 'I know who made that, I know who made that!'"

Lubeck is an expert at social media, walking followers through her creative process in her languid voice. She says she sometimes spends hours listening to Instagram Reels with her eyes closed to pinpoint song clips that will likely make for a viral Reel of her own.