At age 34 with $16,000 of savings and a desire to be her own boss, Rony Vardi launched Catbird. “The vision was small,” she said, recalling investing in her small jewelry shop on Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn in 2004. Catbird has since evolved into an in-demand jewelry brand.

Catbird now employs over 30 jewelers in its manufacturing studio within the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and in 2006, Vardi brought on Co-Creative Director Leigh Batnick Plessner to help design the collection.

As part of our Female Founders Series, the entrepreneurs sat down with jewelry designer Wing Yin Yau of Wwake to talk about their rise in the industry. Read highlights from the CFDA NETWORK. Conversation.

You design jewelry for real women and their real lives. Can you describe these women and how they helped redefine luxury for you today?

Rony Vardi: It’s us. It’s everybody in this room. Starting a store really answers that question. If you start with a store, you have real customers. They’re not imaginary. They’re not like a figment of some market driven experiment. Being in the store for such a long time, you get to understand who they are, what they say, and what they like. You also start to understand everyone’s idea of luxury isn’t about a dollar sign. We don’t need sell things that you need – no one needs jewelry. But being able to afford to give yourself a little prize, even if its $40, and to wear it every day, really speaks to talking to your customer and seeing what they like. It helps you see how jewelry can interact with your own lives.

Every time I speak with you both, its clear how much time you spend in the store. Can you share with the audience what it means to have been so hands on with your business, and what staying close to your customers has done for your business today?

Leigh Batnick Plessner: Our store is so tiny, which has created focus. Everything we do radiates out from that space, but it has to also fit back inside of it. There’s an enormous internal logic among the women who work at the store. You need to be able to show this ring to a customer in a way that also doesn’t compete or undermine the price of another item. Knowing what it’s like to have to answer for a broken ring and any quality control issues face-to-face will never really leave you. We have to make good on that always. It informs our website, and how we develop our own line. We are always partially standing inside of the store when we make decisions.

In all of this time, was there a distinct moment when you realized all of this knowledge from the store has resulted in a breakthrough or you had achieved a new level of growth?

Batnick Plessner: I was working in the store and a grandmother from Ohio came specifically to purchase herself a memory ring (our first knuckle ring). She knew about them. I’m not sure how, but she was just so not our usual demographic that it was a really small but powerful moment of realizing this is travelling beyond just here. We’ve always known the value of customers, whether it’s a grandmother or a fashion expert, by understanding what a customer can do for you through word of mouth.

Explosive growth is always coveted by emerging designers, but in your experience its clear it can be really challenging at times. Can you share how viewing your business as an ecosystem has helped Catbird grow over the years?

Vardi: We were fortunate enough to double in sales very quickly, year after year, and while that is really nice as far as paying your bills and your bank account, it was so difficult to keep up. We couldn’t make enough stuff. We would disappoint customers. Just the management of it was really difficult. Over time, we started to have more control over that and were able to grow slowly. It’s the difference between slamming your foot on the gas and pumping it slowly if you have that control. For instance, we used to do a little more wholesale until we realized we couldn’t do both, so we started scaling back.

Since we moved to Brooklyn Navy Yard, we’ve been able to think about departments and how they work together. We started to think about the business as more of an ecosystem – building a currency of trust not only within our operations, but also extending that outwards to our customer. We try to be transparent about things. We try to host tours. The ecosystem idea for me is that every single person working at Catbird is part of the system.

To elaborate on the theme of giving yourself time and space, Catbird never fell into the space of offering full collections on the fashion calendar. This is usually the crux of an emerging designers business. Can you share how breaking from this format has allowed you to grow stronger as a brand?

Vardi: We didn’t work on a fashion calendar because we never had to. We were not a wholesale business and we had a store. Customers walking in aren’t like, “What do you have for pre-resort in earrings?” It never even occurred to me. We would just make things as we had ideas and when we could afford castings for them. It was very fluid.

It wasn’t until later down the road that Steven Alan asked if we could wholesale, and I thought, “That’s a good idea.”

How do you measure success today?

Vardi: There are so many different ways. At its core, what’s most important to me is to have a really healthy business with a strong foundation and strong culture that can withstand whatever may happen. People have their livelihoods and jobs here. It’s up to me to make sure they can stay afloat.

Batnick Plessner: I get excited when I see customers noticing things. Sometimes you’ll quietly get a comment on social media and you realize they are really paying attention. You’ll see them drawing connections. That’s why social media exists. It’s so nice to see that from our customer, and conversely feel like even though we don’t know them personally, we are engaging with them.

Leigh, earlier we were talking about if you had any design philosophies to share with younger designers in terms of how to achieve self-sustaining growth in a design business.

Batnick Plessner: We are really committed to doing everything ourselves. We have a few small aspects of the business which cannot be done in-house for architecture and scale reasons, but everything else we do here. That helps us make decisions. Photography is a great example. We do photography and styling ourselves. We shoot on people who work here. We sell luxury goods, somewhat that is fanciful, but we are really practical about it. I think that balance is really what keeps us in check.

Do you have a vision for where you want to take Catbird?

Vardi: My focus, now that we are here and able to spread our wings, is really on sustainability and efficiency. We’ve got our big girl pants on. We can hone in on sustainability, which we’ve been working on for a long time, and we can become more efficient.