Guest Author - Susan Dorling

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Elliot Abbott, President of The Hollywood Collection. Turns out the man who came up with a great idea for a jewelry company about 15 years ago is a genuine gem! Warm and engaging, he shares with us his love for his business—and his customers. And clearly he admires the movie stars whose jewelry he lovingly recreates, those actresses who epitomized the glamour of Hollywood in its heyday. He knows these actresses and movies will never come around again. But, as he says, Hollywood is alive and well at The Hollywood Collection. Elliot Abbott is indeed a man who pursued his dream, and made it come true.
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SD: I love The Hollywood Collection! How do you get the designs?

Elliot Abbott: The designs are from those old black and white photographs that we’ve gotten over the years of the stars from different films. You know, when they make movies they have a photographer on the set all the time taking stills, so there will be literally thousands from each movie. We go through as many as we can find, and we find some pieces that we like and send them down to our factory—they do a model for us and we take a look at it. If it’s nice, and pretty, beautiful—we’ll add to the collection—and if it’s ugly and horrible, we won’t. What we’ve learned is that it doesn’t really matter who the star is, if the piece is ugly, ladies don’t want it.

SD: So, you’re looking for the most glamorous jewelry worn in those movies. Where is the factory?

Elliot Abbott: It’s in Bangkok, Thailand.

SD: I read on your website that your customers really like the rhodium plating. Does rhodium make the piece stronger, longer-lasting?

Elliot Abbott: All our base metal is sterling silver. We put rhodium on
because it sort of approximates the look of platinum. So it’s beautiful, shiny. We plate it with either rhodium or 3 microns of 14K gold. We do it because we’re replicating something that has quite a history to it—something that represents some of the most glamorous actresses in the world.



SD: Were those real jewels that the stars wore in those old movies?
Elliot Abbott: I think some of them were—some of them were their own jewelry, and some of them were costume.

SD: I read your customer testimonials on the website. The Hollywood Collection gets rave reviews.

Elliot Abbott: I think one of the things we’ve learned over the years—and we’ve been doing this now for about 14, 15 years—is that women love to tell the story of their jewelry, if they’ve got one. If you talk to a woman who owns a piece from The Hollywood Collection, she loves it when someone asks her, "Where did you get that ring?"

SD: So, they love to tell the story of the star who wore it, and in what movie.

Elliot Abbott: Yes, I think the reason rings sell as much as they do,
is that it’s the first thing you notice on a woman, and ours have such great stories behind them. They feel pretty good wearing something that Monroe wore, Bette Davis wore...

SD: You slip it on and feel like a star!

Elliot Abbott: Yes, I think so.

SD: If the designs are from black and white photographs, how are you able to determine the colors of the stones, whether pink, or blue, or clear diamond, or other stone color?

Elliot Abbott: What we’ve done is look at black and white photos of different pieces and been able to pretty much match what they probably were. You know, maybe a shade of cognac might have been a little darker. But for the most part, it’s pretty easy to tell.

SD: How do you go about making the jewelry? Is there an artist who recreates the design?

Elliot Abbott: Yes, they work from a drawing. A drawing is made from the black and white photo, and then the model makers make the model, and then it goes into production. The factory ships a prototype of each style and we’ll say we love it or not... I’ll show it to my wife, Lisa takes a look at it, and I’ll show it to my daughters. Women have great taste in jewelry. They know what they like, and it’s not hard to know when something works. I wish I could tell you it’s complicated—but you show a woman a beautiful piece of jewelry—they’re in!

SD: Will you ever run out of new designs?

Elliot Abbott: It’s endless. When we were doing movies we’d look through the pictures taken on set to choose publicity shots, from a ‘League of Their Own’ or ‘Awakenings’, (Elliot was the Executive Producer for these movies and others.) or whatever it was, and there were literally 5,000 or 6,000 photos. So you multiply that by how many movies there were in the space of 40 years—it just goes on forever.

SD: How many new pieces do you bring out each year?

Elliot Abbott: About 14 new styles. The thing that takes the longest time is getting it right. We’ll get it sent to us, we look at it and say what about this, what about that— let’s try this, let’s try that. Each of these things takes time but we’re representing such history, we feel beholden to get it right. So it takes us a little while.