Founder & Designer of Periana

An unlikely beginning

Rad Periana did not take the traditional path to becoming a jewelry designer.

Born in Manhattan and raised on Long Island, she grew up creatively inclined—drawing, painting, playing music, and continually making things. But when it came time to build a career, she chose something considerably more practical.

She returned to New York City, earned an MBA in public accounting, and began working in finance.

Eventually, her career would take her through accounting and financial analysis, including roles within the fashion and hospitality industries.

On paper, it made sense.

Creatively, something was missing.

New York, again

Living and working in New York brought Rad back into contact with the things she had always been drawn to.

Old hotels. Dimly lit restaurants. Hidden rooms. Architecture with evidence of another era. Objects that had survived long enough to acquire histories of their own.

Hospitality was particularly influential. It demonstrated that the smallest details could completely change how someone experienced a place—the lighting, an object on a table, the weight of a menu, the music playing somewhere in the background.

It was a different kind of design.

Not simply making something beautiful, but creating a feeling.

That idea stayed with her.

The questions became bigger

At the same time, Rad's interests were moving beyond aesthetics.

A period of personal change led her deeper into questions she had long been curious about: consciousness, symbolism, energy, ancient knowledge, quantum physics, gemstones, and the relationship between our internal state and the world we construct around ourselves.

She became increasingly interested in the things human beings have believed, carried, worn, and assigned meaning to across centuries.

And jewelry sat strangely at the intersection of nearly all of it.

Material and meaning.

Beauty and symbolism.

The ancient and the modern.

Something extraordinarily physical that could represent something entirely invisible.

I wasn't interested only in designing something beautiful. 
I was interested in why we choose certain objects to carry through our lives.

Learning jewelry by making jewelry

Rad was not classically trained as a jeweler.

Instead, she learned by building.

Working directly with CAD designers, stone dealers, lapidaries, casters, setters, polishers, and bench jewelers in New York's Diamond District allowed her to understand jewelry from the inside out.

Her financial background proved less disconnected from design than it initially appeared.

There was something familiar in the precision: measurements, proportions, systems, iteration, and the understanding that a tiny change somewhere can alter the entire result.

But jewelry introduced something her previous work could not.

Material.

Intuition.

Imperfection.

The hand of another person.

The moment an object that had previously existed only as an idea became physical.

I learned jewelry by making jewelry.

The first stone

That process eventually developed into a distinctive way of working.

For many designs, Rad begins with the gemstone.

She personally selects the original stone, which is scanned so the first design can be developed around its particular dimensions and proportions.

From there, she works directly with a CAD designer, revising the model until the piece feels resolved.

When future pieces are made, she again selects the stones individually, with each then cut by a lapidary to the specifications of the design.

It is a slower and considerably more involved way to make jewelry.

That is intentional.

Building the house

Periana emerged from all of these seemingly unrelated parts of Rad's life.

The creativity of her childhood. The discipline of finance. The atmosphere and experience of hospitality. The visual language of old New York. Her fascination with gemstones, symbolism, energy, and the unseen forces that have occupied human curiosity for centuries.

There was no single moment when they suddenly became one thing.

They accumulated.

Eventually, Periana became the place where they could all exist together.

And perhaps because Rad came to jewelry from outside its traditional path, she has never been particularly interested in accepting what a jewelry house is supposed to be.

Periana began with jewelry.

The larger idea is a house built around objects, knowledge, beauty, intention, and the ways in which the things surrounding us become part of our lives.

The curiosity that started it is still very much unfinished.