Freida Rothman’s Women of Strength Campaign
Last month, I had the honor of joining Freida Rothman for an Instagram Live as part of her series for March highlighting women of strength. Women of Strength is also the name of one of Freida’s collections which has been particularly meaningful to her.
More than other things we wear, she feels it’s important for jewelry to be meaningful. And jewelry also easily lends us the opportunity to tell stories. So what a great time I had hearing everything Freida had to share about her family, collection, designs, and even tips for wearing her signature style of stacking bracelets!
Family history
All four of Freida’s grandparents are Holocaust survivors. Brooklyn became the place where her family got a second chance at life. It was from them she says that she learned to approach everything in life with the idea that you can turn any situation around into something good and beautiful and be grateful for all we have.
Freida herself was born and raised in the borough. “I lived in Brooklyn before it was cool,” she laughs. “Back then, nobody wanted to say they were from Brooklyn.” She proudly embraces its physical environment as the inspiration for her designs.
The streets and steel, old brownstones and modern architecture… Even the railroad tracks near her office and New York City manhole covers have served as the inspiration for one of her brand’s most iconic pendants! It’s become one of their signature pendants and was also one of the very first that she designed.
Female entrepreneur
As a mother of four, female entrepreneur, and second-generation jeweler, she’s also become an admirable role model.
Her family has been in the jewelry industry for close to forty years. She got her start by working in her father’s business doing private label. Eventually she found herself doing a lot of design work for luxury brands that her husband believed she could strike out on own her own and put up collections herself.
She felt nervous, with three young kids at the time, but at his encouragement, she made the leap. That was in 2013. Nordstrom picked up her first line and it buoyed her confidence to carry on.
Now she’s a mentor to new talent in the accessories industry. She’s a member in a collective of women’s businesses. And she’s received accolades for her designs.
But the most rewarding part to her is staying connected with the women who wear her pieces. They’re really who she keeps in mind when she sits down to sketch her designs, she says.
I felt a real sense of how she strives to honor and value real people and their stories. This was something that really impressed me. You can see it in her website, but it comes out even more in live conversation.
Women of Strength
It’s especially apparent in her Women of Strength collection, which launched last year. It was designed in honor of her grandmothers who both endured Auschwitz as teenage girls. The STRENGTH bracelet, in particular, is dedicated to them and to their stories.
She hosted a luncheon for over forty female Holocaust survivors right before the collection launched in honor of their remarkable resilience. Like her grandmothers, every single one of them found a way to live, laugh, and love, in spite of the horrors they’d left behind them.
Meaning behind a design
I learned something particularly interesting about Freida’s design, though, as we talked about the STRENGTH bracelet! The word “strength” appears on opposite sides of the oval-hinge bracelet, with one side showing the word right side up and the other side showing the word upside down.
I hadn’t known the reason behind it and simply thought it was a convenient feature for an influencer that made it easy to adjust my bracelet to show the word reading the right way to the viewer, no matter what angle a picture was taken from!
But Freida explained that, facing you, seeing the word “strength” at the top of your wrist was meant to give you strength, by reminding you of it. But turning the bracelet around, so the word faces outward towards your palm, you give of yourself, just as her grandmother taught her to give to others.
Role models to our children
Freida has a deep humility and gratitude for being able to use her platform to share the stories of women who have shaped her as a person and other women she looks up to. She does a lot out of the consciousness of being a role model to her own daughters. (She has two teenage girls out of her four children.) Maybe it’s because the example of her own strong grandmothers had such a profound influence on her as well.
I recall both my own grandmothers as heroes and role models to myself. They lived through the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, which began shortly after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. (The Philippines was seen as a key location in the Asia Pacific by both Japan and the U.S. in World War II.) They both loved to cook, had a great sense of fashion, loved jewelry… I knew they were the bosses of their own households too. ;) And I think I get some of my strength from them. I’m very strong willed! (My husband knows this. Haha!)
For now, I’m grateful, too, for the life I get to live, built on the strength of others and my own as well. I’ve got Freida’s STRENGTH bracelet and will be building up my own stack from within her collection. I’ll explore adding color—some turquoise for spring, perhaps?—and mixing metals as she encourages, too. I’m partial to gold, so I’m going to take a fresh look at the silver pieces I find in my collection.
This time though, as I make sure to stack the bracelets in odd numbers to appeal to the eyes as Freida advises, I’ll also be a lot more aware about a woman’s story behind each piece I slip on.