Natasha Wightman, a British-born former actress and ballet dancer, found inspiration for her first collection, Ravens, in her own backyard—which happens to be a farm on protected meadowlands in the English countryside.
"Why I did this collection sounds like a made-up story," Wightman, a newbie jewelry designer, tells Gem + Jewel. It all began when an ailing adolescent raven took up residence in a tree next to her house. Wightman nursed the bird back to health, but "one day, seven huge ravens appeared on the trees and started to teach Cronk, as we named him, to hunt, fly, and do ariels. He began to leave often and one day he didn't return.”
Five months later, the designer’s contractor called her and said a huge bird had landed outside her kitchen door. “I was certain he had come to say goodbye," she says.
Roughly year later, she began spending time with a female raven, who eventually began to mimic her speech. "Not sure why she came to us, but I was calm, and she felt confident around me,” Wightman says. The bird would accompany her on walks.
The intimate interactions with these feathered friends inspired a debut jewelry collection that uses Victorian-era Whitby Jet (jet stone taken from the Whitby cliffs in England) and moorland boxwood (an evergreen tree) carved into the ravens' likenesses and mixed with various diamonds,18k gold, and platinum.


Hearkening back to the Victorian era, which notably celebrated formidable English birds, the custom-made pieces also feature an ornately carved hair comb featuring a Moorland boxwood carved raven, and cameo-style pieces fabricated from naturally shed antler horn found near Wightman's home.
The new NVW by Natasha Wightman jewelry collection recently launched at Dover Street Market in New York City. The brand’s one-off pieces start at $8,400, but Wightman also made a series of daily-wear pieces in gold and rhodium-plated metal that retain the spirit of the bespoke pieces (they feature a miniature raven motif and start at $2,100.


While the designs are heavily informed by the area of Sussex, England, where she lives, so is the collection’s creators. Wightman is intent on collaborating with local talent: she is currently working with four British artisans and plans to employ more as her line develops. The ravens were carved by artist Graham Heeley, who she discovered after an exhaustive search and who happens to live only around nine miles down the road from her. Another local artisan who paints in miniature painted a carved Hawthorne wood bird in a grey ombre color scheme (it’s anchored to a necklace in the collection).
Wightman is already busy with her next series. In progress is a collection featuring 5,000-year-old bogwood, and a collection that showcases British landscapes painted on 18k gold. All future classics, naturally.