You’d be hard pressed to find two jewelry retailers more committed to sustainability than Anna Bario and Page Neal, cofounders of Bario Neal, a retail design brand with a flagship studio in Philadelphia and a second location in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Founded in 2008, the company has been on JCK’s radar for a long time thanks to its well-established commitment to sustainability (see here, here, and here).
But when we reached out to Bario last month, our goal was to hear about Prismic, the brand’s newest collection of gem-set engagement, cocktail, and wedding rings. Instead, we ended up asking more questions about Bario Neal’s nearly two-decade-long commitment to being an ethical fine jewelry brand.
“When we first started, it was super-uncomfortable for jewelers to talk about responsible sourcing, and it still is,” Bario tells JCK. “To onboard suppliers, our initial audit process is me sitting here on Zoom trying to build a relationship with someone. But when that person sees the code of conduct that I send them and the documents surrounding this, they think that I’m out to judge them and shame them. And I’m not. I want to call people in and not call people out. But that’s the perception.”
Bario Neal published its first sustainability report in 2019, and is currently in the midst of preparing its third report, due out in 2025. “It’s quite a heavy lift,” Bario says. “It takes probably three months to write, but we’re compiling the data nonstop. We’re recording, obviously, where our materials are sourced, but also energy consumption, like carbon impact, for two years.
“I spent some time doing statistics in college, and it serves me well because it’s like, ‘This is how many carats of diamonds we use. This is how many grams of gold. This is how many Montana sapphires versus Australian sapphires versus Sri Lankan sapphires. This is the number of women-led mining organizations we partner with. These are our objectives for the next two-year term to get climate neutral–certified.’ We do a lot of philanthropy for a brand as small as we are. We give a lot away. And we do a lot of watering the gardens at the community school in Philadelphia.”
As for the Prismic collection, it’s a bold aesthetic statement. “We really wanted to play with form in a new way,” Bario says. “Bario Neal has a brand language and a design language rooted in combining shape and color in a specific way. Most people think of us and they think of our cluster rings.
“We wanted to look at that visual language and iconography with a fresh lens that reflects, I think, some great ways that the industry is changing. Everything got really small for a long time after the 2008 recession. It was like teeny, teeny, Catbird. That’s little. And then after COVID, everybody was like, ‘Hey, I want to have fun. I want a 4-carat diamond. I want to live my life.’
“And so the Prismic collection feels like celebration: ‘Let’s put lots of different shapes together in a new way.’”
Below, Bario talks to JCK about Bario Neal’s extensive supplier onboarding process, the two issues she and Neal are most closely focused on, and why the term sustainability report is a turn-off.
How did you and Page come to found the company?
Page and I went to college together at Oberlin. We were 21, and I was living in the Bay Area, and she was in New York. We developed this concept of a very design-forward, responsibly sourced jewelry brand.
It was 2006 when we conceptualized it. We started doing really basic research and connected with Ethical Metalsmiths in its first incarnation, which was under Christina Miller. She has been a mentor and a friend since then. She got Page and I complimentary registration at the Madison Dialogue Summit, which was a conference in 2007 at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. We connected with the Alliance for Responsible Mining. And we connected with Tawoma, the women miners organization from Tanzania. And we connected with Steve D’Esposito from Earthworks, which is now Resolve. We made some really good friendships.
What was it like for you to be asking these kinds of questions and talking about these issues when so few retailers were?
It feels like a long time now. There were a couple folks like Beth [Gerstein] and Eric [Grossberg] from Brilliant Earth. Marc Choyt, who’s out of Santa Fe, has been doing this from an activist perspective. Toby Pomeroy, who now does Mercury Free Mining. There are maybe 20 people that have been doing this, like Eric Braunwart at Columbia Gem House and Cristina Villegas. We’ve been this little crew of annoying activists for a long time.
Tell us about the work you do to create accountability among your suppliers.
We have an internal Bario Neal standard, a very rigorous internal process, that we developed with consultants. You have to pinpoint your meaning. Fair Trade is a standard, and it makes sense to people because it means something. Saying responsibly sourced is greenwashing if it doesn’t have a standard behind it. So we had to develop our own standard.
It’s a great process that’s incredibly time-consuming and expensive. I learned how to build my supply chain in a healthy way, with good people that I trust and care about. But just to be able to buy something requires that we basically meet with the founder or the chief sustainability officer or the sole proprietor. Sometimes it’s a woman in Kenya. And then we send them a lot of scary-looking documents and then have a multi-hour conversation where I ask a series of questions that cover basically all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
It’s based on the ISO International Labor Standards. It covers everything from grievance practices at your 300-square-foot office in the Diamond District in New York to certifications for the cutting facility you’re using in India. And it goes really deep. We do pre-research independently. We have this long conversation. Two to three members of our team review that conversation, and then we ask for documentation of any claims made, like how do I know that even if it’s tanzanite that it’s from Tanzania and the specific region you’re telling me it’s from? You don’t have to be able to tell me the exact mine because maybe that’s proprietary. But how can you make me know what you’re telling me is true? And then we have a metric.
The first time you did this in a codified way was for your first sustainability report in 2019, correct?
Well, we started developing the process in 2018, and it took us about a year working with Christina Miller and her firm. They worked really hard to learn from other industries. And they knew from other standards and nonprofit work, like Pact, which has done a lot of this. They took the NGO modeling and helped us develop a process that would give us our own internal standard as if we were a certification house, honestly. So the code of conduct lays out our expectations.
That’s the first thing people get. It covers a lot of international labor practice, international environmental regulations. Women’s empowerment is a big goal for us.
People get that and they have to sign acknowledged receipt. And that’s important because we work with a lot of suppliers that have certain materials that we can purchase from them, but we certainly can’t purchase all of their materials. So they need to know our standard clearly enough that they can say, “I won’t even offer you the things that are not for you.”
After that, we have the supplier interview conversation. It’s usually three people, and we ask for the documentation. We evaluate what they send us, like pictures of the cutting facility, certifications if you have a mine site in Sri Lanka—like, show me your license. We evaluate all of that audit material, and then we have a grading metric. For every question, they get a 0, 1, or 2, depending on the quality of their response. And there’s a standard code for how to interpret those answers, 2 being the best and 0 being the worst. There are a couple of items that are immediate red flags.
Like what?
Like not having an AML [anti–money laundering] policy. Unless somebody can get an AML in place within three to six months, we will not work with them. I can’t tell you the number of people who’ve been like, “Wait, I have to do that?” The baseline is $50,000. That’s not a lot of business in jewelry. So everyone needs to do it, but they don’t know how. I’ve sent a lot of people to JVC because people can do it quickly. It’s not that hard.
The goal is to be an on-ramp, especially for the very newest members of our supply chain, like independent women miners. I think there’s a huge disconnect between what our industry looks like to a consumer and the 90 million artisanal miners that are the base of our supply chain. Those artisanal miners are perceived by the old guard of the industry to be a risk factor. And those artisanal miners are perceived by my generation to be something to promote and benefit.
The old guard hears me ask these questions, and they’re like, “Scary, stop, blood diamonds, you’re going to kill my business. Don’t talk about that.” And to my generation of consumers, I don’t want to push information on them, but it’s kind of like a requirement for a certain demographic.
Sustainability doesn’t sell a product for us, but it allows a customer who already likes us to purchase from us in a really beautiful way because we show them, “Hey, we did our homework. We care about our partners. And we want to sell you something that’s good for you and good for every person and place that touched it along the way.”
Now that you’re working on your third sustainability report, are you doing anything different?
I think I’ll probably look at changing what we call it because I think in the era of ESG [environmental, social, and governance], sustainability reports sound like greenwashing. If I hear sustainability report, I think, “Hmm, they probably spent more money making that report than they did on the actual sustainability efforts,” which is very often true.
What would you call it then?
I don’t know. I’m still workshopping that.
What are the most important things the industry needs to focus on now when it comes to ethical, responsible sourcing?
The most important things are investing in mercury-free mining, not necessarily that independent nonprofit, but solving that problem. And I think the second problem is women’s empowerment. There are a lot of women globally who are part of the supply chain, and they get the scraps at the artisanal level. And there are a lot of great models for organizing independent women miners into cooperatives that can sell directly to the American market.
Have you noticed growing interest in these topics from mainstream jewelry retailers?
There was a point in 2018, ’19, through 2021 when that was building, and you could see that business-minded people figured out that there was space for this. There was a market for this. Now, we’ve been doing it because I always knew there was a market for this, but I took a really long-game perspective. We’re slow fashion. I don’t need to make money doing this now because I want to build something intergenerational. I realize that that’s been really hard for us as a business at certain points, and it’s really benefited us as a business at certain points.
I don’t know that it’s worth it for everyone. I think that it’s worth it for the world to get better at this. What we’re doing with our standard is we’re eliminating the risk of incorporating materials that might have been a part of the more challenging aspects of our industry. We’re not saying that the goods that we sell are good and that the open market is a bad supply chain. It’s not. Most of it is upstanding, kind people who want to work together and then go home to their families. I believe most people are good. But they do bad things out of desperation. And there’s a lot of desperation in the incredibly impoverished areas where a lot of these mineral resources exist.
Top: Icon kite-cut ring in Fairmined 18k yellow gold with blue-green sapphire, $2,950, baguette diamond band in reclaimed 14k yellow gold, starting at $3,690
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