10/21/2026
Remembering CINER // former NANO client
In 1892, Emanuel Ciner, an Austrian immigrant, opened a fine jewelry company in Manhattan. When the 1929 crash wiped out demand for precious jewelry, his sons moved into high-end costume jewelry. They kept the same discipline but used glass cabochons and hand-set rhinestones instead of diamonds. That change produced one of the most recognizable names in American jewelry.
For more than a century, CINER was made by hand in New York. Bars of white metal were cast in rubber molds, then filed, polished and heavily plated in 18k gold. Every stone was set and every enamel color was applied by craftspeople who often spent decades at the bench. Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Kennedy and the Duchess of Windsor all wore it. A CINER necklace made the cover of Vogue in 1966. Through it all the house stayed in the family, led in later years by Emanuel’s granddaughter, Pat Ciner Hill.
We had the privilege of working with CINER on their digital flagship. We designed and built an ecommerce experience for a heritage house: a design system drawn from their archive, a step-by-step craftsmanship story and a scrapbook of 125 years of history. Few brands had a story that rich to tell, and fewer still had kept actually making things the old way.
So it was genuinely sad to see CINER close its doors in 2022. Losing a house like that means losing more than a brand. You lose the skills of the people who made it, the molds on the shelves and a living piece of New York manufacturing history. The pieces will keep circulating among collectors, but nobody will make new ones.
Thank you, CINER, for 130 years of craft. It was an honor to help tell your story.
