Perhaps you may catch a glimpse of her through the window of her workshop, her silhouette bent over a new piece, a pair of jewellery pliers between her fingers, surrounded by wires, beads and clasps delicately scattered across the table. Her gaze always turned towards a new idea, Katarina Radnik Žmasek, a former lawyer turned designer, has turned her passion into a profession and her workshop into a jewel box. It is here, between creativity and know-how, that the story of Cloud&Co begins.
A story to wear
From her workshop, Cloud&co. imagines delicate jewellery with clean lines, designed to be mixed, matched and worn throughout everyday life. An aesthetic where a taste for detail meets a certain simplicity, between bracelets, necklaces, earrings and accessories. Cloud&co.’s signature clouds can be personalised and combined to create a little sky of your own, a delicate reflection of the person wearing it. In 2020, a new adventure joins the house: Islands&co., with the Croatian islands as its muse.
The archipelago of memories
There are places that we never quite leave behind. Landscapes that return at the turn of an image, a light, a piece of sea. Places that we cherish and find again, sometimes years later, with that gentle nostalgia for moments we wish we could hold on to.
Jewellery offers precisely this almost timeless possibility: keeping close to oneself what one loves. And when the memory of a place meets material, something precious is created. A silhouette can be enough to bring a landscape back to life, a shape to evoke a summer, a little silver island to make an entire world resurface.
This is the whole idea behind Islands&Co.: celebrating the beauty of the Croatian islands by giving them a form that can be worn. Hvar, with its sun-drenched landscapes; Mljet and its mysteries; Vis, long preserved off the Adriatic coast; Brač and its shores; the Elaphiti Islands, scattered off Dubrovnik… So many names that already evoke a journey, a light, a particular escape.
These island silhouettes become the heart of a collection in silver and gold-plated silver, conceived around memory. The islands are transformed into minimalist jewellery that can be combined, collected and personalised, until one’s own archipelago is composed.
Because there is something deeply moving about the idea of wearing an island. Of keeping close to oneself a piece of this Croatia made of sea, stone, sunshine and memories. And when the holidays come to an end, when the boat returns to the mainland and the shores finally recede, a small silhouette remains in the hollow of the neck to remind us that some journeys never truly come to an end.
Time at your fingertips
Behind every piece, however, there is much more than materials and ideas: there are many small hands. Those of a collective of women who, in the quiet of the workshop, bring the creations to life with patience, precision and meticulousness. Here, nothing is rushed. Every gesture matters, every detail is worked by hand, in keeping with an artisanal know-how where time becomes a true material.
Buying one of their creations then means looking differently at what one holds in one’s hands: no longer simply a beautiful object, but the result of patient work, of a passing down of knowledge and of a multitude of invisible gestures. A piece to which time, precisely, gives that uniqueness that could never be reproduced. Behind these gestures lies a broader vision, where craftsmanship becomes a true art of living.
Where the journey continues
After travelling through the islands, back on solid ground, in Zagreb as in Dubrovnik, where Cloud&co. has its own showcases. Two addresses that extend this story between jewellery, memories and travel.
From Katarina’s workshop to the shores of the Adriatic, Cloud&co. and Islands&co. ultimately tell the same story of a desire: to make what one would never want to leave behind last. And if some jewellery allows us to keep a piece of Croatia close to our hearts, Cloud&co. perhaps also invites us, from time to time, to keep our heads in the clouds.
