“I learned from my father that you have to be hands-on,” says Adi Alfardan, the creative force behind the high-jewellery company bearing his name. “You cannot let it go. If you let it go, nothing goes as planned. If you aren’t dealing directly with clients, you will not get anywhere, especially when you’re working with high-jewellery pieces.”
Speaking of not letting go, Adi was encouraged early on in his career by his family to study finance and eventually became a banker. But he soon decided the world of finance and banking wasn’t where he envisioned his future. Instead, Adi returned to a world he had known and loved all his life, and embraced his true passion for jewellery design.
This passion has long coursed through his family’s veins, as his father and grandfather both worked in the field. Adi didn’t just want to follow in their footsteps, which were grounded in the pearl market, he also wanted to expand the family business into haute joaillerie gemstone design.
“My heart, my passion and my soul are in jewellery,” Adi confirms. “While pursuing my studies, I worked in jewellery stores – I had to work my way up and prove myself.”
Growing up, Adi would accompany his father Hasan on his travels, helping him source pearls and advising him on sales to royal and prominent collectors in Europe, the Arabian Gulf region and India. But he always found himself drawn to gemstones.
The 32-year-old is part of the third generation of his family to work in the international jewellery industry. His grandfather Ibrahim, a renowned pearl merchant, started the family business. He was famously known for his ability to instinctively discern the authenticity of natural pearls and other gemstones based on their aesthetic beauty and brilliance, a skill that earned him the charming nickname “the pearl doctor”.
“My grandfather lived a healthy 110 years, and he was a very loved and respected pearl merchant,” shares Adi. “He used to buy pearls from ships that would come from across the ocean, and he would pick his pearls very carefully. Some of them, he would sell to other merchants across the Gulf region.”
For hundreds of years prior to the discovery of oil, pearls were an important source of trade in the Arabian Gulf. At one point during the early 19th century, the region was believed to be, according to London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, a major global supplier of pearls.
The Alfardan family has worked in the pearl industry since the early 1800s. But it was Ibrahim and then Hasan Alfardan, Adi’s father, who transformed the family business into a household name for merchants, bringing ships filled with pearls into the United Arab Emirates during periods when business in the industry flourished, such as the 1950s.
During its early pearl-trading days, crucial business for the family came from Ibrahim’s travels to India. “He was a great traveller and wouldn’t stop for anything,” explains Adi. “He would take his bag with pearls and travel to Mumbai. There, he would go to sell them to the maharajas, or travel all the way to Paris to sell more. This was his typical route.”
With a family so steeped in the UAE’s noble pearl trade history, it was only natural that, as a young boy, after school, Adi spent his afternoons shadowing his father at work. He saw first-hand how Hasan collaborated with jewellery designers and dealt with clients, and how his impressive work ethic enabled him to meticulously select gemstones and pearls for new pieces of jewellery even into his eighties and nineties.
As Adi’s skills and passion for jewellery continued to deepen, he finally felt it was time to build a new chapter in his legacy. So, in 2015, he decided to strike out on his own and launched Adi Alfardan Jewellery. With the establishment of this company, he has followed the siren’s call to design a variety of haute joaillerie pieces that focus on meticulously crafted parure made with impeccable artistry and incorporating the highest-quality gemstones, such as sapphires, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds.
Adi’s skill at creating elegant and timeless sketches of haute joaillerie has garnered him a reputation for being not only an adept businessman but also a skilled artisan. “Our focus is on exclusive mid- to high-end jewellery,” he says. “We produce 60 to 80 sets per year, incorporating natural gemstones of the highest calibre and beauty.”
Adi’s mission today is to push his business forward while building a legacy as a high-end jeweller and private jewellery expert, standing shoulder to shoulder with the top haute joaillerie houses of Europe.
“For me, it’s all about beautiful gemstones and craftsmanship,” says Adi, who makes it a practice to only source gemstones from ethical mines around the world. “I don’t ever want to hold a stone that has been taken from someone.”
“We need to make sure everyone is happy. The energy in a beautifully sourced stone is so vibrant, so full of life and so good,” he notes. “We want to ensure that each person who has worked to source the stone is happy. That’s how energy flows and that’s what I personally believe, as my father and grandfather believed before me.”
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