Why Tiffany is still banking on its bird

To gaze upon one of Tiffany & Co’s Bird on a Rock brooches is to feel an overwhelming sense of joy. The figure of the bird, almost cartoonish in design, has an exaggerated crest, feathered ruff and a perfectly conical beak that looks to be mid-peck. It would be silly if it weren’t for the disproportionately large stone it perches on, which brings it into serious high-jewellery territory. The story goes that the former Tiffany chairman Walter Hoving laughed out loud when he was first presented the brooch in 1965 – before encouraging its designer Jean Schlumberger to make more. 

Some six decades on, Bird on a Rock has taken off as a bestseller. “It’s been the fastest-growing single icon since the acquisition,” says Anthony Ledru, Tiffany’s president and CEO, who joined the company after LVMH bought the house in 2021. He estimates that the category has grown 20 times between 2020 and 2023, noting that the bird has become a substantial part of the brand’s high-jewellery business. “The numbers are still very limited because of the price point, but we were only selling a few beautiful pieces a year, and now it’s what we sell the most at any high-jewellery event by far.”

Ledru, who is recounting this from a client salon within Tiffany’s landmark store in New York, has been instrumental in amplifying the motif. “For me, it was a sleeping beauty. This is one of the oldest icons we have. It’s joy, it’s optimism, it’s craftsmanship with a twist of surrealism.” He continues: “When Jean created that bird, it was exactly him – there was no brief, no marketing. He was doing it to please his imagination.” 

It’s joy, it’s optimism, it’s craftsmanship with a twist of surrealism

Jean Schlumberger, one of Tiffany’s few named designers, was renowned for his interpretations of flora and fauna. Born in 1907 in Mulhouse, France, to a family of textile manufacturers, he displayed a flair for drawing early on. In his early 20s, he moved to Paris and began making jewellery out of objects he found at flea markets, selling them to his circle of fashionable friends. He opened his own workshop on Rue La Boétie, and soon caught the attention of Elsa Schiaparelli, who in 1937 enlisted him to design collections of buttons for her suits – which included animals, shells, cherubs, fruit and insects – as well as costume jewellery. His eminence reached across the Atlantic, where he opened a New York salon with his friend and business partner Nicolas Bongard, and became close with Harper’s Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland. She commissioned him to make a brooch based on a dream she’d had about the architecture of Place Stanislas in Nancy – and loved it so much she kept it on her bedside table. 

In 1956, Hoving appointed Schlumberger as vice president of Tiffany, where he shaped an important chapter of the brand’s history, continuing to create jewels informed by the natural world. His first Bird on a Rock brooch was inspired by a yellow cockatoo he had seen around his holiday home in Guadeloupe; one of his early designs featured a diamond and ruby bird perched atop a lapis lazuli, and was sold to garden designer Bunny Mellon.

“Tiffany didn’t make so many of them in the beginning,” says Claibourne Poindexter, vice president and senior specialist in Christie’s jewellery department, adding that most of the brooches the auction house has sold from the mid to late 20th century were mounted on either amethyst or citrine. In 1995, eight years after Schlumberger’s death, a retrospective of his work was held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. In a tribute to the designer, the house had its famous 128.54-carat yellow diamond remounted to form a Bird on a Rock brooch. “That’s what really brought it into the mainstream.”

The recent development of Bird on a Rock is one of the more successful actions taken by Tiffany since LVMH’s acquisition, says Mario Ortelli, managing partner of luxury advisers Ortelli & Co. “The repositioning and development plan that LVMH has started at Tiffany is a big and articulated programme, especially in a category with a product cycle that’s long and slow like jewellery,” he says, adding that some actions are delivering results earlier than others. Part of this is an increase in the amount of brooches produced each year, as well as a broadening of the motif to include bracelets and watches. Selena Gomez wore one of the new designs – a necklace made of flying birds – to the Emmy Awards, while Florence Pugh wore a pendant, in which the bird is sitting with its head turned over its shoulder, to the BoF 500 Gala in Paris. 

In April, the brand launched Rainbow Bird on a Rock using paillonné enamel and colourful gems to further amp up the colour. Then there is Bird on a Pearl, which employs natural saltwater pearls from Hussein Alfardan, whose family’s collection contains pre-1930s exemplars from the Persian Gulf, before the local industry dried up. “They sold pretty much immediately,” adds Tiffany’s chief gemologist Victoria Reynolds.

Reynolds says Tiffany has noticed also an uptick in sales among collectors. “It’s a really eclectic group – a lot of men, but also a lot of women. We have one man in Florida who has four birds. He’s collecting the colours, and he wears them all.” The renewed popularity is also reflected in the secondary market, where the brooches have “consistently been bringing in more than they did before”, says Poindexter. “Typically, at auction, they were selling between $20,000 and $30,000 on the secondary market, and now we’ve seen a dramatic shift upwards.” He notes a citrine Bird on a Rock that sold in September 2022, which had a pre-sale auction estimate of between $12,000 and $18,000 but went for $75,600. “That really was the first time we all realised that these things are going up in value.” 

The interest and correlating expansion has increased the average price of Bird on a Rock, which, Ledru says sat at around $35,000 to $40,000 pre-LVMH acquisition. “It’s more like $100,000 today, all the way up to $4mn.” This has helped to bolster Tiffany’s high-jewellery business, which has been a priority for LVMH since 2021. “Brand elevation has been key for Tiffany,” says Ortelli. “One part of that is focusing on heritage, and Bird on a Rock is part of that – plus it’s unique and highly recognisable. The second is to push the high-jewellery business [that] is still small compared to other big brands like Cartier. One of the best ways to sell a $1,000 piece of silver jewellery is to promote the high jewellery.”

Tiffany plans to further extend the motif into fine jewellery, with new collections including bracelets and pendants planned at different price points. “We believe there’s room to extend it,” says Ledru, “to talk to a much greater audience.” His mission is clear – to give everyone wings. 

Photographer’s assistant, Anton Andalus. Stylist’s assistants, Aylin Bayhan and Lucia Bustillo. Set design assistant, Bertille Miallier. Production, Town