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Nicola Bathie Designs the Perfect Custom Bridesmaid Earrings

Nicola Bathie is a chic, San Antonio interior designer crafting custom earrings full of unique texture and statement-making design. Her bespoke jewelry reflects her interior design portfolio, and vice versa—white canvases sprinkled with pastel palettes, gold accents, and floral motifs. Her Instagram feed blends the two art forms tastefully, proving that fashion and interior design go hand-in-hand. Time and time again, we saw the fluttering tutus deck bridesmaid troupes so we dove deeper into the inspiration and design process behind Nicola Bathie.

“Designing jewelry fell into my lap when I wasn’t looking for it,” Nicola says about the origins of her business. While studying interior design at TCU, she created a necklace for herself which led to a series of similar requests from sorority sisters. “While I was perusing necklace materials at a Fort Worth bead store, the owner was teaching an earring making class, but no one came. She asked me if I wanted to learn how to make earrings out of wire and I said ‘sure!’” This serendipitous meet-cute provided Nicola with the tools to match her artistic vision.

As she and her sorority sisters graduated college, wedding season arrived, and so did her first custom bridesmaid earring order. “I received a couple emails asking if I designed bridesmaid earrings, but I was just starting out so I didn’t have an answer quite yet. When one of my friends inquired if I could make the same earring over and over again, I said ‘why not’ and designed my first custom bridesmaid earring order.” That was 2015, and since then, Nicola has designed bridesmaid orders for almost 100 brides. She offers brides wholesale pricing, which is a generous perk and pleasant surprise for brides ordering in large quantities. The design process evolves and develops with each bride—typically beginning with a current design leading to fine tuning and customization details like color and size. Her designs depend on where the hole exists on each stone and how it can play with the other elements. This process requires flexible creativity with each and every material that crosses her back-house-turned design-studio desk.

“Weddings are becoming so personalized down to every little detail,” Nicola remarks. Her business plays well into this industry trend. “I had a bride carrying a wedding-day clutch with rose gold font so she asked for custom rose gold earrings that mirror her accessory. It can be that custom,” she exclaims. But not every bride needs to be that specific. “Brides have even sent me images of their bridesmaid dresses and asked me to pick an earring design for them,” she says reflecting on the range of her customers.

She credits Instagram as her biggest source of customer traffic, and it’s easy to see why. She blends her work comfortably, due to the symbiotic relationship between interior design and fashion. “Interiors and fashion bounce off each other. If you see animal prints on the runway, you will see it in interiors. Wicker recently was seen everywhere so I pulled that into my designs. Now hearts and the ’90s are back, so I sourced heart-shaped stones and more whimsical earrings,” she says.

For Nicola’s own wedding, her bridesmaids donned large, pearl flower earrings (above) that mirrored her small, diamond flower earrings—a “something old” from her mother. Nicola continues to wear her own designs intermixed with other jewelry collections—a successful form of free advertising. As her business continues to grow beyond the San Antonio city limits, brides and family members catch wind of her classic-yet-modern aesthetic, sometimes without realizing how customers come about. “Texas has a way of doing that, you know,” she says.

On Ordering Your Own Nicola Bathie Bridesmaid Earrings

The process takes about two to three months, but it’s never too late to ask. Whether you know exactly what you want or just have a budget in mind, reach out to Nicola to collaborate on color, length, price point, and visuals to design your perfect piece. Your bridesmaids will thank you.

Drop Nicola Bathie a line here.

The post Nicola Bathie Designs the Perfect Custom Bridesmaid Earrings appeared first on D Weddings.

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